Ella Baker AND THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT
GENDER & AMERICAN CULTURE
COEDITORS
Thadious M. Davis
Linda K. Kerber
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Nancy Cott
Cathy N. Davidson
Jane Sherron De Hart
Sara Evans
Mary Kelley
Annette Kolodny
Wendy Martin
Nell Irvin Painter
Janice Radway
Barbara Sicherman
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom
Movement
A RADICAL DEMOCRATIC VISION
Barbara Ransby
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill & London
© 2003
The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
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Excerpt from Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone
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Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S., Inc.,
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The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ransby, Barbara.
Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement: a radical democratic
vision / Barbara Ransby.
p. cm.—(Gender and American culture)
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-8078-2778-9 (alk. paper)
1. Baker, Ella, 1903–1986. 2. African American women civil rights
workers—Biography. 3. Civil rights workers—United States—
Biography.
4. Civil rights movements—United States—History—20th century.
5. African Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century. 6. National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People—Biography.
7. Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—Biography. 8. Southern
States—Race relations. 9. United States—Race relations. I. Title.
II. Series: Gender & American culture
E185.97.B214R36 2003
323’.092—dc21 2002153275
cloth 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Now, Who Are Your People?: Norfolk, Virginia, and Littleton, North
Carolina, 1903–1918
2. A Reluctant Rebel and an Exceptional Student: Shaw Academy and
Shaw University, 1918–1927
3. Harlem during the 1930s: The Making of a Black Radical Activist and
Intellectual
4. Fighting Her Own Wars: The NAACP National Office, 1940–1946
5. Cops, Schools, and Communism: Local Politics and Global Ideologies
—New York City in the 1950s
6. The Preacher and the Organizer: The Politics of Leadership in the
Early Civil Rights Movement
7. New Battlefields and New Allies: Shreveport, Birmingham, and the
Southern Conference Education Fund
8. Mentoring a New Generation of Activists: The Birth of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960–1961
9. The Empowerment of an Indigenous Southern Black Leadership,
1961–1964
10. Mississippi Goddamn: Fighting for Freedom in the Belly of the Beast
of Southern Racism
11. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Radical
Campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s
12. A Freirian Teacher, a Gramscian Intellectual, and a Radical
Humanist: Ella Baker's Legacy
Appendix. Ella Baker's Organizational Affiliations, 1927–1986
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Ella Baker in The Crisis magazine, 1932 197
Ella Baker, ca. 1942 198
Ella Baker with NAACP colleagues, September 1945 199
Ella Baker at NAACP fair, 1950s 199
Ella Baker in Shreveport, Louisiana, 1959 200
Ella Baker and Myles Horton, ca. 1960 200
Ella Baker smiling, 1962 201
Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Stokely
Carmichael, and others, 1964 202
Ella Baker in Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1964 202
Ella Baker in Jackson, Mississippi, 1964 203
Ella Baker singing at SCEF luncheon, 1970s 204
Ella Baker at Angela Davis rally, 1972 205
Ella Baker with David Dellinger and Marilyn Clement, 1980 206
Ella Baker with William Kunstler and Marilyn Clement, 1980 206
Ella Baker in her Harlem apartment, 1984 207
Ella Baker, Jackie Brockington, and Carolyn Brockington, 1985 208
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has taken me on a long and circuitous path, which began in
1989 when I chose to research the life of Ella Baker as a dissertation
topic. Since that time I have encountered many wonderful fellow
travelers, and experienced difficult detours along the way. One of my
children grew up, another was born, and both my parents passed away.
Political struggles and personal commitments repeatedly pulled me away
from the task of research and writing.
If it takes a community to raise a child, it certainly takes a community
to produce a book. Many people have contributed to this book directly
and indirectly, and it would be disrespectful to Ella Baker's memory if I
did not take time and space to recognize them. I must first express my
appreciation to Ella Baker's family, especially her niece Jackie
Brockington, who died months before the book was published, who,
along with Joanne Grant, gave me early and extensive access to Ella
Baker's papers when they were still housed at her old apartment in
Harlem. Jackie never said, “No,” to anything I asked for—photographs,
copies of documents, or a few hours of her time. I was touched that she
always asked about my family and trusted me with the precious
memories of hers. She exemplified those fine qualities for which others
praised her beloved aunt Ella. I regret terribly that she did not live to see
the completion of the book. I am also deeply indebted to Joanne Grant,
whose documentary Fundi brought Ella Baker to life for my generation
and whose own biography of Baker made a vital contribution. Joanne
was a friend and colleague throughout the writing of my dissertation. In
the spirit of Ella Baker, we chose to cooperate and coexist rather than
compete in our efforts to tell her story in our own words. We agreed
early on that there was certainly room for two Ella Baker biographies.
I have had the benefit of quite a number of amazing readers and
researchers who have made invaluable contributions to this project.
Cathy Cohen, my dear friend and adopted sister, has been a glowing
inspiration and an unwavering source of support. During our morning
phone conversations, at our respective computers, she often began with
the question, “How's Ella?”—as if checking in on an ailing family
member. She read large portions of the manuscript and opened her home
and her heart at critical junctures. Tracye Matthews, friend, colleague,
reader, research associate, fellow activist, and birthing coach, read,
edited, and dug up details to help move this book along. The photo of
Ella Baker that she gave me has hung above my computer for six years
now. My dear friend Premilla Nadasen schlepped down to the Municipal
Archives in New York and maneuvered her way around bureaucratic
hurdles to get access to Ella Baker's divorce records. She and her family
then welcomed me into their Mount Vernon, New York, home for a
weeklong writing retreat in the summer of 2001 to finish one round of
revisions on the book. Thanks to Billy Gladstone for keeping the coffee
brewed and Tyler Kirin for being a delightful distraction during my stay.
Gerald Horne is a generous colleague who, when I asked him to read
500 pages in a week, responded that he would be honored. Timothy
Tyson and John Dittmer were also extremely knowledgeable and
thoughtful readers and continue to be treasured colleagues, who remind
me with their own sterling examples that we can love our subjects and
still write damn good history books. And I will be ever grateful to the
amazing Charles Payne, whose own work helped to bring Ella Baker to a
wider audience and who nudged me along for years with hugs, gentle
criticism, profound insights, and words of reassurance.
Martha Biondi took time away from her own book-writing to read and
comment on my manuscript. Her comments have strengthened the final
product, and her professional and political example continues to
strengthen my resolve. I would also like to thank scholar-activist Leith
Mullings for her generous reading of several chapters. Colleagues of
mine at the University of Illinois at Chicago—Sue Levine, Bill Ayers,
Amanda Lewis, John D'Emilio, and Eric Arnesen—read the manuscript
carefully and provided enormously helpful suggestions and comments.
John and I have had many wonderful Ella and Bayard lunches to talk
about our tandem biographies. We all anxiously await what promises to
be the definitive biography on Bayard Rustin.
Aldon Morris introduced me to Ella Baker in his civil rights seminar
fifteen years ago, and I am ever grateful. He continues to be a friend,
mentor, and colleague. Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Stewart Burns,
and the staff at the King Papers Project were enormously helpful to me at
the early stages of this project during the week I spent at Stanford. They
provided advice, information about historical documents and obscure
archives, and a friendly and intellectually stimulating environment.
Daniel Holliman aided me in digging up information in George
Schuyler's papers at Syracuse University at a moment when timing was
everything. Herbert Hill welcomed me into his home, fed me a fine meal,
and shared important insights and recollections. On a separate occasion
in another city, Lenora Taitt-Magubane did the same thing. Other
researchers have sent me little treasures—letters, news clippings, and
interviews—to fatten my already engorged Ella Baker files. For these
contributions, I thank John Bracey, Jerry Markowitz, Andrea Vasquez,
John Thornbery, Julius Scott, Pam Sporn, Archie Allen, Wendy Plotkin,
and Kathleen Cleaver. Penny Von Eschen and Kevin Gaines have also
been wonderful colleagues and supportive friends. Vincent Harding's
support is also much appreciated.
I owe still another enormous debt to historians Nell Painter, Linda
Kerber, and Linda Gordon, all notoriously busy women who took time
out to read my manuscript and offer suggestions and kind words of
encouragement. Nell went the extra mile to help me grapple with the
vexing issue of Baker's private life by providing me with a rich reading
list of psychological studies on the social meanings of privacy and
identity, which I have tried to weave into the text.
Through their own pioneering work, the following scholars have
created an academic and a popular audience for black women's history,
and each of them in different ways has supported and inspired my work:
Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, Tera Hunter, Deborah Gray
White, Stephanie Shaw, Tiffany Patterson, Rosiland Terborg-Penn, Ula
Taylor, Chana Kai Lee, Stanlie James, Angela Davis, Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham, Joy James, Sharon Harley, Paula Giddings, and Beverly
Guy-Sheftal.
And Robin D. G. Kelley is in a category all his own. He has always
been there for me. My brother-friend-comrade-mentor. His
encouragement, advice, solidarity, and remarkable example of a brilliant
scholar and a fundamentally humane person have sustained my optimism
about unraveling the past and shaping the future. When I began reading
his recent book, Freedom Dreams, during the final stages of my own
writing process, I simply could not put it down, despite a looming
deadline. It has informed the final chapter of this book in powerful and
unexpected ways.
The time Ella Baker spent with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee in the 1960s was some of her most rewarding work. Meeting
and getting to know the remarkable collection of people associated with
SNCC was for me one of the most rewarding aspects of researching this
book. SNCC activists Judy Richardson, Connie Curry, and Ivanhoe
Donaldson read the entire manuscript and put up with numerous followup queries as acts of solidarity and generosity. Judy went out of her way
to provide me with a copy of an excerpt from Judith Rollins's All Is
Never Said that mentions Ella Baker. I thank them from the bottom of
my heart, as well as all of the other SNCC people who allowed me to
interview them (their names are listed in the bibliography); they have
warmly welcomed me into the SNCC family and included me in reunions,
reminiscences, and sometimes a little bit of movement gossip. I am
humbled by their friendship and kindness, especially that of my first
SNCC friend, Martha Prescod Norman. Each one of them, as well as the
admirable and indefatigable Anne Braden, gave me the dual gifts of time
and trust. Even those I did not formally interview—Bill Strickland,
Charles McDew, Michael Thelwell, Cleveland Sellers, Zohara Simmons,
Gloria House, Julian Bond, Larry Fox, and others—informed my reading
of Ella Baker's life through their public remarks and in private
conversations. I hope this book is some small measure of repayment. The
contribution of Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) to this project was
heroic even though we only spent a few hours together. Despite terminal
cancer, he persevered in the freedom struggle until the end. I interviewed
him at his bedside during his last visit to the States. Despite the frailness
of his body, his mind was sharp and his words clear. He spoke to me like
a man with a stake in both the past and the future. Other individuals
whom I interviewed have passed on, including Conrad Lynn, John
Henrik Clarke, Jackie Brockington, Prathia Hall (Wynn), Marvel Jackson
Cooke, and Gloster Current. Their memories and contributions live on in
these pages and beyond.
And what would I have done without excellent editors, researchers,
and librarians? Grey Osterud, a fine wordsmith with a keen eye, helped
me through the last phase of writing, chapter by chapter. From her desk
in rural Massachusetts to my desk in Chicago, she offered ideas,
questions, and suggestions. Interspersed between revisions, we digressed
to learn about one another's backgrounds, politics, religious views, and
children. I jokingly called her my book therapist because she cheered me
on as much as anything else and reminded me that what often felt large
and unwieldy could be harnessed and completed.
Kate Torrey, the director of the University of North Carolina Press,
has given new meaning to the words “patience” and “grace.” Although
my early manuscript was in a very unpolished state, she saw potential in
this project and nurtured and nudged it and me along every step of the
way. A skilled editor, and an all-around fine human being, she has most
importantly given me the space, time, and encouragement needed to
bring this book to fruition. Two other capable editors, Paul Betz and
Pamela Upton, have seen me through the final stages.
A small battalion of graduate and undergraduate students has
contributed bits and pieces to this project over the decade. Some dug up
obscure articles in the library, while others traveled with me to archives
to excavate more pieces of the Ella Baker puzzle. With one exception,
most of them worked for short stints, ranging from a few hours to a
couple of months, but all of their labors are appreciated; they include
Jasmine Patel, Emily Mann, Jeff Helgeson, Greg Simmons, David
Brewer, Rachel Caidor, Gareth Canaan, David Levine, and Rychelle
(Kitty) Hooper (who was one of the stalwarts). John Santiago, Deva
Woodly, Brandi Adams, Lisa Jones, Quincy Mills, and Anne McCarthy
also contributed. No words can express the gratitude I feel for Sarah
Wood, my first research assistant, who stumbled with me through the
early days of this project, diligently tracked down information and
individuals, and served as a sounding board for ideas; an impeccable
young colleague, she was also a devoted friend. She then came back to
help me in the final stages despite her own hectic schedule as she
prepared to move to Pennsylvania. Ella belongs to her as much as to
anyone.
Numerous librarians, archivists, and photographers have provided me
with priceless resources. I am immensely grateful to Howard Dodson,
Diane Lachatanarre, and Andre Elizee at the Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture in New York City for allowing me to plow
through Baker's unprocessed papers once they were deposited there.
Also deserving of special thanks are the photographers Harvey Wang and
Charmian Reading and the staffs at the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, the North Carolina Collection at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, the
Library of Congress, and the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at
Howard University.
There are others who have never read a line of this book as of yet but
who live in its pages because for me they represent a continuation of Ella
Baker's tradition. For much of the time I was conceiving of this book, I
was engaged in various political struggles, attempting to learn from and
apply Ella Baker's lessons as I went. In the process, I worked alongside
some extraordinary people who embodied Baker's democratic values and
radical humanist vision. The members of African American Women in
Defense of Ourselves, especially Elsa Barkley Brown and Deborah King,
took Baker's ideas and put them directly into practice; they continue to
be an inspiration to me. Bill Fletcher, with whom I worked for five years
on the Black Radical Congress, stands out as a model of the selfless
organizer—enormously wise, profoundly humane, often
underappreciated. Manning Marable, Leith Mullings, Abdul Alkalimat,
Fran Beal, Lisa Brock, Cheryl Harris, Humberto Brown, Jarvis Tyner,
Prexy Nesbit, Ajamu and Rukiya Dillahunt, and Jean Carey Bond are
other activists from whom I have learned a great deal as well. Tanaquil
Jones was a dear friend and close ally for years as I struggled to hear Ella
Baker's political voice and find my own. Much of the reason I decided to
write this book in the first place has to be attributed to my political
family at the University of Michigan in the 1980s, who sat in with me at
the administration building to demand an honorary degree for Nelson
Mandela, picketed during the dead of winter for the Martin Luther King
Jr. holiday to be recognized by the university, and helped establish the
Ella Baker–Nelson Mandela Center for Anti-Racist Education. Those not
already mentioned include Hector Delgado, Michael Wilson, Roderick
Linzie, Lillien Waller, Rajal Patel, Nikita Buckhoy, Lannis Hall, David
Maurasse, David Fletcher, Jocelyn Sargent, Emery Smith, Kimberly
Smith, Regina Freer, Anthony Vivasis, Brett Stockdill, and too many
more to name. A. Sivanandan, Jenny Bourne, Hazel Waters, and Liz
Fekete at the Institute for Race Relations in London have provided me
with a political home away from home during my visits there. Back
home in Chicago, my friends at the Crossroads Fund have buoyed my
optimism in bleak political times.
There are those whose contributions were professional or political,
and then there are those whose contributions were entirely personal.
Arlene Branscomb, my daughter Asha's caregiver for five years, may not
even remember the topic of this book. However, Arlene gave me the
most precious gift a mother can hope for, peace of mind that my child
was in capable and loving arms when I was working. Her kindness and
warmth reminded me daily of the care and interdependency that holds
families and communities together. Jacqui BassiriRad too was a
surrogate mom for Asha many afternoons during the final stage of the
book's preparation, and Hormoz BassiriRad kept us well fed with Persian
delicacies. Laura Henderson at the Buzz Café in Oak Park kept me
fueled with caffeine as I sat and wrote for hours.
Beth Richie sent me flowers and good wishes during an especially
intense period of work. Other friends—Aisha Ray, Linda Hillman,
Lynette Jackson, Lisa Yun Lee, Kim and Mary Byas, and Bernardine
Dohrn—have sustained me in many ways as I juggled my various
responsibilities in order to complete this book. Linda took time out to
pull herself away from her potter's wheel to read and give feedback on
the text on three occasions. Her skills as a writer and editor were
enormously helpful.
Finally, the members of my immediate family, to whom this book is
dedicated, have loved me unconditionally and welcomed Ella Baker into
our home and our lives as if she were one of us. They have endured my
intermittent need to shut myself off from the world and write, and they
have pulled me out of my seclusion to remind me that there is a larger
world beyond this book and my computer. Despite his own extremely
demanding career, my husband, Peter Sporn, has been my anchor in the
storm for nearly half of my life, and I could not have written this book
without his love and his unrelenting support. My daughter, Asha,
reminds me day in and day out of the power of a creative imagination to
remake things from what they are into something better. I am in awe of
her energy and determination. Like Ella, she will be her own woman and
demand that the world make a place for her. My son, Jason, the budding
activist/philosopher took off for his first year at Brown University just as
this book was being sent to the publisher. In the summer of 2002, he was
both my research assistant and my political comrade. His honest
observations and probing questions pushed me to dig deeper and think
harder about the meaning of Ella Baker's legacy for his generation.
Jason's wit and wisdom made this book a better product, and his love and
friendship have made me a better person.
My extended family—Jo and Paul Sporn, Pam Sporn, Paul Foster,
Lelanie Foster, and Papito Foster—have loved and tolerated me through
the writing of this book. Paul Sporn has served as a writing coach and
ever-loving confidant for which I thank him. My parents and
grandparents— Charlie and Ethel Ransby, Rosia and Henry Pittman, and
John and Queenie Fallens, all of whom have passed on—never read this
book. Even if they had been alive, they might not have done so. My
mother had the most formal education in the family, and she never
finished high school. They were sharecroppers in Newnan, Georgia, and
Greenwood, Mississippi, who migrated north to become factory workers
and maids in Detroit, Michigan. They were the kind of strong, hard-
working, generous, astutely aware ordinary people that Ella Baker
valued so much. Perhaps that is what initially attracted me to her story
and her ideas. It is certainly my memory of them and their example of
the best humanity has to offer that inspires me to persevere as a historian
and an activist.
ABBREVIATIONS
ACMHR:
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights
AFL:
American Federation of Labor
CIO:
Congress of Industrial Organizations
COFO:
Council of Federated Organizations
CORE:
Congress of Racial Equality
CP:
Communist Party
ILGWU:
International Ladies Garment Workers Union
MFDP:
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
MIA:
Montgomery Improvement Association
MPOC:
Mass Party Organizing Committee
NAACP:
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
PRSO:
Puerto Rican Solidarity Organization
SCEF:
Southern Conference Education Fund
SCHW:
Southern Conference on Human Welfare
SCLC:
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
SDS:
Students for a Democratic Society
SNCC:
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
TSCC:
Temporary Student Coordinating Committee
UAW:
United Auto Workers
UCMI:
United Christian Movement Inc.
UNIA:
Universal Negro Improvement Association
VEP:
Voter Education Project
WEP:
Workers Education Project
WPA:
Works Progress Administration
YMCA:
Young Men's Christian Association
YNCL:
Young Negroes Cooperative League
YPF:
Young People's Forum
YWCA:
Young Women's Christian Association
Ella Baker AND THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT
INTRODUCTION
In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a
society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be
radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think
in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning—getting
down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that
does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you
change that system.
Ella Baker, 1969
Ella Baker spent her entire adult life trying to “change that system.”
Somewhere along the way she recognized that her goal was not a single
“end” but rather an ongoing “means,” that is, a process. Radical change
for Ella Baker was about a persistent and protracted process of discourse,
debate, consensus, reflection, and struggle. If larger and larger numbers
of communities were engaged in such a process, she reasoned, day in and
day out, year after year, the revolution would be well under way. Ella
Baker understood that laws, structures, and institutions had to change in
order to correct injustice and oppression, but part of the process had to
involve oppressed people, ordinary people, infusing new meanings into
the concept of democracy and finding their own individual and collective
power to determine their lives and shape the direction of history. These
were the radical terms that Ella Baker thought in and the radical ideas
she fought for with her mind and her body. Just as the “end” for her was
not a scripted utopia but another phase of struggle, the means of getting
there was not scripted either. Baker's theory of social change and
political organizing was inscribed in her practice. Her ideas were written
in her work: a coherent body of lived text spanning nearly sixty years.
Biography is a profoundly personal genre of historical scholarship,
and the humbling but empowering process of finding our own meanings
in another person's life poses unique challenges. As biographers, we ask
questions about lives that the subjects themselves may never have asked
out-right and certainly did not consciously answer. Answers are always
elusive. We search for them by carefully reading and interpreting the
fragmented messages left behind. Feminist biographers and scholaractivists like myself face particular challenges. It is imperative that we be
ever cautious of the danger inherent in our work: imposing our
contemporary dilemmas and expectations on a generation of women who
spoke a different language, moved at a different rhythm, and juggled a
different set of issues and concerns. The task of tailoring a life to fit a
neat and cohesive narrative is a daunting one: an awkward and
sometimes uncomfortable process of wading barefoot into the still and
often murky waters of someone else's life, interrogating her choices,
speculating about her motives, mapping her movements, and weighing
her every word. No single descriptor ever seems adequate to capture the
richly nuanced complexity of a life fully lived. Every term is inherently
inadequate, each one loaded with someone else's meanings, someone
else's baggage. How can a biographer frame a unique life, rendering it
full-bodied, textured, even contradictory, yet still accessible for those
who want to step inside and look around?
My journey into Ella Jo Baker's world has been a personal, political,
and intellectual journey, often joyous and at times painful. It has taken
me in and out of some twenty cities and to numerous libraries, archives,
county courthouses, kitchen tables, front porches, and a few dusty attics.
This long journey has been marked by periods of difficult separation
followed by hopeful reunions. In the process I have revisited the faces,
experiences, and southern roots of my own mother, father, grandparents,
aunts, uncles, and cousins: Mississippi sharecroppers, domestic and
factory workers, honest, generous, hard-working, resilient black people.
Most importantly, in the process I have developed an intense and unique
relationship with my subject. I have chatted, argued, commiserated, and
rejoiced with Ella Baker in an ongoing conversation between sisters, one
living and one dead. In this book, I have tried to tell Ella Baker's story
partly as she would have told it and partly the way I—a historian and an
activist of a different time and place—felt it had to be told.
There are those who insist that biographical writing is compromised
and tainted by an author's identification and closeness with her subject.
This does not have to be the case. I do not apologize for my admiration
for Ella Baker. She earned it. I admire her for the courageous and
remarkable life she led and for the contributions she made without any
promise of immediate reward. I admire her for the ways in which she
redefined the meaning of radical and engaged intellectual work, of crossclass and interracial organizing, and of a democratic and humanistic way
of being in the world, all the while trying to mold the world around her
into something better.
I first came upon Ella Baker's story through my search for political role
models, not research subjects. As an anti-apartheid and antiracist student
activist at Columbia University and the University of Michigan in the
1980s and as a black feminist organizer thereafter, I was drawn to the
example of Ella Baker as a woman who fought militantly but
democratically for a better world and who fought simultaneously for her
own right to play more than a circumscribed role in that world. As an
insurgent intellectual with a passion for justice and democracy, Ella
Baker held an affinity for the most oppressed sectors of our society. So,
my first connection to Ella Baker was a political one. This connection
has enhanced rather than lessened my desire to be thorough, rigorous,
and balanced in my treatment of her life and ideas. For me, there is more
at stake in exploring Ella Baker's story than an interesting intellectual
exercise or even the worthy act of writing a corrective history that adds a
previously muted, black, female voice to the chorus of people from the
past. To understand her weaknesses as well as her strengths, her failures
as well as her triumphs, her confusion as well as her clarity is to pay her
the greatest honor I can imagine. To tell her life truths with all their
depth and richness is to affirm her humanity and all that she was able to
accomplish, because of and at times in spite of who she was. There are
vital political and historical lessons to be gleaned by looking back in
time through the lens of Ella Baker's life.
Ella Josephine Baker's activist career spanned from 1930 to 1980,
touched thousands of lives, and contributed to over three dozen
organizations. She was an internationalist, but her cultural and political
home was the African American community. So it is within the Black
Freedom Movement in the United States—the collective efforts of
African Americans to attain full human rights, from the nadir of
segregation at the turn of the twentieth century through the peak of the
civil rights movement in the 1960s and beyond—that I locate her story.
For Baker, as for W. E. B. Du Bois, racism was the litmus test for
American democracy and for international human rights. Both were
convinced that racism had infected every major social problem of the
twentieth century: colonialism and imperialism, war and fascism, the
oppression of women, the politics of crime and punishment, and the
exploitation of labor; both recognized that very little progress could be
made without tackling the political cargo of race. Baker organized for
democratic rights for over fifty years, from Harlem to Mississippi, in
interracial coalitions and African American organizations, and (unlike
Du Bois) she lived to see the day when ordinary black folks enjoyed
some of the fruits of freedom. But she died knowing that the process of
struggle and social transformation would continue.
Ella Baker played a pivotal role in the three most prominent black
freedom organizations of her day: the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC); and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC; pronounced “snick”). She worked alongside some of
the most prominent black male leaders of the twentieth century: W. E. B.
Du Bois, Thur-good Marshall, George Schuyler, Walter White, A. Philip
Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., and Stokely Carmichael. However,
Baker had contentious relationships with all these men and the
organizations they headed, with the exception of SNCC during its first six
years. For much of her career she functioned as an “outsider within.” She
was close to the centers of power within the black community, but she
was always a critical and conditional insider, a status informed by her
gender, class loyalties, and political ideology. Baker criticized unchecked
egos, objected to undemocratic structures, protested unilateral decision
making, condemned elitism, and refused to nod in loyal deference to
everything “the leader” had to say. These stances often put her on the
outside of the inner circle.
While her most public political associations were with men, some of
Ella Baker's most significant and sustaining relationships were with a
group of women activists, some of them not very well-known, who were
her friends and co-workers over many years. These women provided the
sisterly support that allowed Baker to fight all of the battles she did, both
inside and outside the Black Freedom Movement. Ella Baker was part of
a powerful, yet invisible network of dynamic and influential African
American women activists who sustained civil rights causes, and one
another, across several generations. Her life intersected with such notable
black women as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Dorothy Height, Nannie Helen
Burroughs, Pauli Murray, Mary McLeod Bethune, Septima Clark, and
Fannie Lou Hamer. She was dear friends with NAACP legends Ruby
Hurley and Lucille Black. As Diane Nash and Eleanor Holmes Norton
suggest, women like Ella Baker were laying the foundation for
contemporary black feminists even before the term was invented. This
earlier generation of women lived the politics others have since written
about, challenging treatment that belittled the seriousness of their
contributions, resisting models of organizing that placed men and men's
work at the center, and carving out public identities as leaders,
strategists, and public intellectuals—identities that were generally
reserved for men.
A creative and independent thinker and doer, Baker operated in a
political world that was, in many ways, not fully ready for her. She
inserted herself into leadership situations where others thought she
simply did not belong. Her unique presence pioneered the way for fuller
participation by other women in political organizations, and it reshaped
the positions within the movement that they would occupy. At each stage
she nudged the movement in a leftward, inclusive, and democratic
direction, learning and modifying her own position as she went.
For Ella Baker, anchoring her activism within the black freedom
struggle was not simply a matter of identity but rather a part of a political
analysis that recognized the historical significance of racism as the
cornerstone of an unjust social and economic order in the United States
extending back to slavery. A movement for black freedom, defined
broadly, she thought, would inevitably be a movement against economic
exploitation and the oppressive conditions faced by other groups within
American society as well. At least it had that potential. African
Americans and, in a complex variety of ways, other peoples of color
were excluded from basic access to the political process, marginalized
socially, and super-exploited economically for the better part of the
twentieth century. If this contradiction could not be confronted, Baker
felt, there was no hope for American society as a whole. More precisely,
she felt that to push and challenge political and economic leaders on this
question would expose some of the society's fundamental flaws and
serve as an impetus for transformative social change on multiple fronts.
An aging and irascible Virginia Durr, the legendary white civil rights
activist from Montgomery, once confronted me at a conference to remind
me that “Ella Baker didn't just belong to black people.” She was right.
Baker's work, influence, and political family extended well beyond the
confines of the African American community and the struggle against
racism. She had strong ties to the more democratic tendencies within the
white left. She worked closely with the multiracial labor and cooperative
movements, while at the same time championing struggles against
colonialism and imperialism around the world.
Ella Baker was concerned with the plight of African Americans, but
she was also passionately committed to a broader humanitarian struggle
for a better world. Over the course of her life, she was involved in more
than thirty major political campaigns and organizations, addressing such
issues as the war in Vietnam, Puerto Rican independence, South African
apart-heid, political repression, prison conditions, poverty, unequal
education, and sexism. Still, because of who she was—a daughter of the
Jim Crow South and a granddaughter of slaves—and because of the
political analysis she formulated early in her career, which was centered
on antiracist politics, Baker's primary frame of reference was the African
American experience and the struggle for black freedom.
Baker identified with and helped advance a political tradition that is
radical, international, and democratic, with women at its center. She
critiqued black separatism as a narrow, dead-end strategy, yet she did not
hesitate to criticize the chauvinism and racism of white colleagues in
multiracial coalitions all the while stressing the importance of black
leadership. Her own political ideology and worldview was a result of the
cross-fertilization of the vibrant black Baptist women's movement of the
early twentieth century, the eclectic and international political culture of
depression-era Harlem, and the American tradition of democratic
socialism—a variegated mix of northern and southern, religious and
secular, American and global, left and liberal elements.
Ella Baker's life gives us a sense of the connections and continuities
that link together a long tradition of African American resistance. Each
intergenerational organization she joined, each story she told, each lesson
she passed on was a part of the connective tissue that formed the body
politic of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States from the
1930s into the 1980s. Following Baker's path back through the years,
trying to look at national and world events from her vantage point, takes
us to different sites of struggle, opens up different windows of
conversation, and pushes us into different people's lives than if we were
to have someone else as our guide.
Finally, Ella Baker was a skilled grassroots organizer and an
“organic” intellectual—one who learned lessons from the street more
than from the academy and who sought to understand the world in order
to change it. Many other activists looked to her, especially during the last
half of her life, for her strategic and analytical insights and guidance. Her
radical, democratic, humanistic worldview, her confidence in the wisdom
of the black poor, and her emphasis on the importance of group-centered,
grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political
contemporaries. Her ideas and example influenced not only SNCC in the
1960s, but also the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
and the embryonic women's movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s.1
Baker was a role model and mentor for an entire generation of activists
who came of age politically in the 1960s. Within progressive circles,
even those who did not know her knew of her.
Ella Baker was a movement teacher who exemplified a radical
pedagogy, similar to that of Latin American educator and political
organizer Paulo Freire. She sought to empower those she taught and
regarded learning as reciprocal. Baker's message was that oppressed
people, whatever their level of formal education, had the ability to
understand and interpret the world around them, to see that world for
what it was and to move to transform it. Her primary public constituency
was the dispossessed. She viewed a democratic learning process and
discourse as the cornerstone of a democratic movement.
Ella Baker's private life was as unconventional as her public one. For
example, many of her political colleagues never knew that she had, at
one time, been married. She deemphasized her married life, never took
her husband's name, and traveled extensively over the course of her
nearly twenty-year marriage. Throughout the marriage, her principal
passion was politics; after her divorce, she was singularly devoted to her
first love.
Some aspects of Ella Baker's private life remain a mystery, not
because I have not snooped and pried with the voyeuristic appetite of a
private detective, but because she was so consciously and thoroughly
discreet about personal affairs and protective of her family and domestic
life. One of my chief frustrations as a biographer has been the difficulty
of attempting to follow the trail of a woman who, in many respects, tried
not to leave one. There is no memoir or diary, nor are there boxes of
intimate personal correspondence. What remains is, for the most part, her
public voice and presence as documented in over thirty archival and
manuscript collections of organizations and individuals across the
country. Her own personal papers, which chronicle only part of the story,
are now deposited at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture in Harlem. I have spent untold hours pouring over the documents
there. I have interviewed dozens of people who knew her and tracked
down letters, papers, and photographs in the most out-of-the-way places.
Yet there is much we may never know.
A part of interpreting and revisiting Ella Baker's life has involved a
series of oral history interviews with friends, family members, and co-
workers who knew her over the years. These conversations gave me not
only the facts about Baker's life but the feel of it as well. While these
excavated memories helped me add movement and fluidity to otherwise
still-life snapshots of Baker, I also appreciate the limits of our
recollective powers. I have tried in every instance possible to find more
than one source to substantiate particular individual assertions. In other
instances I have qualified those assertions as speculative or remembered.
I also realize that written documents can be misleading, so I do not mean
to privilege them without condition. All of the sources are used as pieces
of a larger puzzle, reinforced by other parts as they fit or don't fit what is
already known. In addition to the recollections and observations of
others, I have tried to tap Ella Baker's own words as much as possible.
Even when speaking for herself, however, in the dozen or so interviews
that have been preserved, Baker is more often than not speaking with the
benefit and the blurred vision of hindsight, years and in some cases
decades after the fact. As honest and straightforward a person as she was,
and as lucid as she was until the early 1980s, I cannot always afford to
take her at her word. Memories fade, ideas change, and thus what we
thought we felt or did at the time is filtered through the lens of our
ongoing sense of ourselves. In reconstructing her political views,
however, I gave Ella Baker and myself greater license than when
reconstructing a series of events largely because I am as concerned about
where she ended up politically and philosophically as I am with how she
got there. Her conclusions and self-representation are critical elements in
summing up her life's work and her ideas.
Psychologists have written about the complex ways in which public
individuals, especially women, demarcate the boundaries between public
and private lives as a form of psychological protection. Ella Baker
guarded her privacy. Her refusal to talk about certain aspects of her past,
while being wholly open about others, resembles “the culture of
dissemblance” that historian Darlene Clark Hine talks about. In
analyzing the silence surrounding black women and rape, Hine writes:
“By dissemblance I mean the behavior and attitudes of black women that
created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded
the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors.”2 In the
case of Ella Baker, the shielding was from public view and scrutiny, not
only from her oppressors, but often from friends and colleagues as well.
Shielding their private lives from public view provided a margin of
protection for black women of Ella Baker's generation, who were vilified
and stereotyped by whites and often circumscribed to a limited sphere of
activity by black men. According to her friend Lenora Taitt-Magubane,
Ella Baker never wanted to be “pigeonholed.” The less known about the
complex person she was, perhaps the less likely she was to be sized up
and assigned an identity with narrow borders. Bernice Johnson Reagon
once observed that Baker was the first woman she met who would not
allow a discussion of her marital status. This was liberating for Reagon
and other young women because they then felt personal and romantic
relationships could be left at the door when they went into a meeting,
which better enabled them to participate on their own terms regardless of
who they were or were not dating at the time. Hine concludes that “a
secret, undisclosed persona allowed the individual black woman to
function, to work effectively as a domestic in (sometimes hostile) white
households.”3 I would add that it may have allowed Ella Baker and many
of her female counterparts to function more effectively—although not
without a psychological price—within predominately male civil rights
leadership circles. Still, all was not shielded from public view. And from
literally thousands of documents, articles, interviews, flyers, letters, and
FBI reports emerges the story of Ella Baker's amazing and incandescent
life.
This biography surveys Ella Baker's long and rich political career in an
effort to explain the unique political and intellectual contributions she
made to the movement for radical democratic change in America. Like
most biographies, it begins by exploring the familial and educational
experiences that were the foundation of her public political life. Baker's
childhood and schooling through college are covered in chapters 1 and 2.
Baker's well-read and deeply religious mother was her moral anchor in
her early years, providing her with intellectual training and a sense of
social responsibility that she would carry with her always. Her time in
boarding school and college at Shaw Academy and University in
Raleigh, North Carolina, was a period of intellectual and political
growth. Baker had a stellar academic career and organized her first
protest against what she perceived as an unjust exercise of authority by
college administrators. Chapter 3 explores Ella Baker's eye-opening
cultural and political encounters in Harlem in the late 1920s and 1930s, a
time when she secularized her childhood values and embraced the radical
democratic vision of social change that she would modify and build on
for the next half century. In chapter 4 I survey Ella Baker's six-year
tenure as a part of the national staff of the NAACP from 1940 to 1946, first
as a field secretary and then as the national director of branches. During
the intense period of World War II, Ella Baker traveled throughout the
minefield of the American South, organizing local branches, encouraging
local leaders to be more active, and building up a network of contacts
that she would rely on for years to come. In her capacity as the NAACP's
director of branches, Baker sought to democratize the organization by
empowering local and regional leaders and by deemphasizing legal
battles and giving more attention to grassroots struggles. Chapter 5
focuses on Baker's work concerning school reform and police brutality in
New York City in the 1950s; these struggles occurred against the
backdrop of mounting anticommunist and Cold War policies and
rhetoric. Baker herself had a curious and ambivalent relationship to the
communist question, one that evolved and changed over time.
The second half of the book deals with the period of the modern civil
rights and black power movements, the apex of Baker's political sojourn.
Chapters 6 and 7 chronicle Ella Baker's work with the SCLC in the mid- to
late 1950s and specifically her concentrated work with the more active
SCLC affiliates in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Birmingham, Alabama.
Chapter 6 offers a perspective on Baker's complicated and conflicted
relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. and the tensions between them,
which revolved largely around their divergent views on leadership and
organization. Chapters 8 and 9 detail Baker's pivotal role in the founding
of SNCC and her capacity as mentor and adviser to the young activists of
that group from 1960 to 1966. Chapters 10 and 11 focus on SNCC'S work
in Mississippi in the 1960s, her work with the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party (MFDP) and the rise of black power. Chapter 11 ends
with a discussion of Ella Baker's political involvement in the 1970s and
1980s after the collapse of SNCC. During the final years of her life, Ella
Baker spoke out passionately against political repression and in support
of anticolonial struggles, most notably in connection with the Free
Angela Davis campaign and the Puerto Rican Independista Movement.
For several years she also lent her name and her dwindling energies to an
effort to create an independent third political party to the left of the
Democrats through the Mass Party Organizing Committee.
The book concludes, in chapter 12, by outlining Ella Baker's political
philosophy as it relates to both historical and contemporary contexts,
offering a living legacy to all of us who share her vision of a more just
and democratic society, not as an event in history but as an ongoing
process around which to organize our lives and work.
On Saturday, December 13, 1986, precisely eighty-three years to the day
after her birth, Ella Jo Baker died quietly in her sleep in the modest
Harlem apartment she had occupied off and on for nearly forty years.
The end of her life did not come as a surprise to those close to her. She
had been sick for some time, and her health had been spiraling
downward rapidly in the months preceding her death. But as natural and
uneventful as her passage may have seemed, it represented the end of a
rich and influential political career, and even the end of an era. Those
who gathered to mourn her death the following Friday symbolized in
their diversity the breadth and depth of Ella Baker's influence on
American politics for the better part of the twentieth century.
It was a cold and rainy day in New York City and a week before
Christmas when the overflow crowd piled into Harlem's historic
Abyssinian Baptist Church to remember and to celebrate a woman who
had touched more lives than she herself could have realized. Those who
came to honor Ella Baker wore fur coats, African prints, Islamic kufis,
and yarmulkes. They were young with dreadlocks and elderly with
graying temples and receding hairlines. They were black and white and a
myriad of shades in between, men and women, rich and poor, those
formally educated and those self taught. Among those who gathered
were politicians, religious leaders, entertainers, and renowned scholars.
Crowded in among the celebrities were those whom Ella Baker
sometimes referred to as the little people: people without credentials or
titles, but people she had valued and respected in her life, and who now
honored her in death. They were neighbors, local merchants, and even
those who didn't know Ella Baker personally but knew her enough by
reputation that they came to pay their respects. This is what Ella Baker
had done for decades. If a child was born or if someone in her extended
family passed away, she found time to acknowledge the importance of
that singular life. Harlem activist Yuri Kochiyama, an internment camp
survivor who was on the speaker's platform with Malcolm X when he
was assassinated, remembered fondly Ella Baker's kindness toward her
family when her son, Billy, died in 1975. Ella Baker did not know Billy
Kochiyama, really. He had gone to Mississippi in 1965 as an act of
solidarity with the growing Black Freedom Movement, and they crossed
paths briefly. When he died tragically ten years later, Baker sent a
telegram and made a phone call to Billy's parents to express her
condolences. Yuri Kochiyama, who had admired Baker from a distance,
and met her only once, treasured the gesture. Yuri Kochiyama in turn
paid her respects that rainy December day in Harlem.4
Throughout much of her life Ella Baker was a radical humanist and a
consummate coalition builder, connecting young and old, black and
white, neophytes and veterans, and staunch leftists and ambivalent
moderates. Gathered together in the Abyssinian church that day was the
eclectic and sometimes fractious group of people Baker had claimed as
her political family. Crowded shoulder to shoulder, they found their
political differences receding in their shared admiration for a fallen
comrade, sister, teacher, and mother. Ardent nationalists, orthodox
Marxists, establishment politicians, and free-floating radicals—people
with long-standing antagonisms, some of whom hadn't spoken to each
other in years—mingled in a slow common procession. Only Ella Baker
could convene such a gathering. There were touching moments that
suggested her political children had actually internalized her belief that
in the end the politics are only as important as the real human beings
with and for whom we struggle. Standing at Baker's graveside in the
frigid December air, white activist Bob Zellner found himself positioned
between his two old friends, Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) and Kwame
Ture (Stokely Carmichael): two men who had come to symbolize “Black
Power” and had been associated with militant black nationalist rhetoric.
There they stood, the three of them together. Al-Amin draped his coat
around the ill-clad Zellner, and Ture quietly shared his umbrella. No
words were exchanged.
The voice that echoed most powerfully through the cavernous church
where Ella Baker's funeral was held was that of Bernice Johnson
Reagon, one of Ella Baker's political daughters and founder of the black
women's a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Her commanding
voice drew attention to every line of Ella Baker's favorite movement
song, “Guide My Feet.” “Guide my feet, while I run this race, . . .
because I don't want to run this race alone . . . because I don't want to run
this race in vain.” And Ella Baker did neither. She ran long, she ran hard,
and she ran with a diverse assortment of folks over some fifty years. Ella
Baker did not represent any single tendency of the American left or a
particular wing of the Black Freedom Movement; rather, she forged a
hybrid political vision and an inclusive style of democratic leadership.
The long-term goal, for which she admittedly had no blueprint, was
simply a more democratic, egalitarian, and humane world. Baker's values
and her deeply felt ideals guided her feet over variegated and difficult
terrain. In the race, she was not a sprinter but a long distance runner.5
1 NOW, WHO ARE YOUR PEOPLE?
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, AND LITTLETON, NORTH
CAROLINA, 1903–1918
I was young when I became active in things and I became active in
things largely because my mother was very active in the field of religion.
Ella Baker, 1979
Black Baptist women encouraged an aggressive womanhood that felt
personal responsibility to labor, no less than men, for the salvation of the
world.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 1993
In the early 1980s Paula Giddings, the writer and historian, went to Ella
Baker's modest Harlem apartment to interview the legendary activist for
a book Giddings was writing on African American women's history. At
that meeting Giddings had hoped to learn more about the half century of
history Ella Baker had witnessed and helped shape: her role in the Works
Progress Administration and the cooperative movement in Harlem
during the 1930s; her dangerous organizing work for the NAACP in the
South during the 1940s; her collaboration with and criticisms of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s; and her pivotal role in the founding
of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. A few
minutes into the visit, Giddings realized that the exchange she had hoped
for was not to be. Instead of responding to Giddings's questions about the
past, Baker kept asking her a single question: “Now, who are your
people?” Giddings regretfully concluded that, after all the battles Ella
Baker had fought and won over the course of her fifty-year political
career, she was losing the fight with Alzheimer's and was no longer able
to provide the information and insights she sought. To Giddings, it
seemed as if Baker were groping for a cognitive anchor in the
conversation.1 Yet Baker's desire to know and place her visitor was
characteristic of what had been important to her throughout her life. The
question “Now, who are your people?” symbolizes Baker's approach to
life-history as well. Who one's people were was important to Ella Baker,
not to establish an elite pedigree, but to locate an individual as a part of a
family, a community, a region, a culture, and a historical period. Baker
recognized that none of us are self-made men or women; rather, we forge
our identities within kinship networks, local communities, and
organizations.
Ella Baker's family, her childhood experiences in Norfolk, Virginia,
and Littleton, North Carolina, and her secondary and college education at
Shaw University in Raleigh and her transformative political encounters
in Harlem during the Great Depression all contributed to her evolving
identity as a woman, an activist, and an intellectual, and set the stage for
the years of political activism that would follow.
So, who were Ella Baker's people? She was born on December 13,
1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up from the age of seven in the
small town of Littleton, North Carolina. Ella Jo was the middle of three
surviving children; she had an older brother, Blake Curtis, and a younger
sister, Maggie. Her parents, Georgianna (Anna) Ross Baker and Blake
Baker, raised their children to be upstanding members of the rural
community where they themselves had grown up. Her maternal
grandparents, Mitchell and Josephine Elizabeth Ross, owned their own
farm, and her grandfather was a noted Baptist clergyman. Her paternal
grandparents, Teema and Margaret Baker, were landless tenant farmers.2
Both sets of grandparents had grown up under slavery, and their differing
educational and economic positions reflected both the obstacles that
faced freedmen and freedwomen and the achievements of black families
in the rural South after Reconstruction. Baker's parents attended
secondary school and sought to better their position, moving to the city
of Norfolk in search of opportunity and then returning to Littleton in
search of security. Blake's job as a waiter on a Norfolk steamer line
required him to travel, while Anna presided at home and played a
prominent role in the Baptist church.
During her childhood in Littleton, Ella Baker was nurtured, educated,
and challenged by a community of strong, hard-working, deeply
religious black people—most of them women—who celebrated their
accomplishments and recognized their class advantage, but who also
pledged themselves to serve and uplift those less fortunate. Anna Ross
Baker was the single most influential force in Ella's early life. Ella
described her mother as a stern and pious woman who believed in
discipline almost as much as she believed in God: “My mother was a . . .
very positive and sort of aggressive woman.”3 Ella grew up in a femalecentered household, surrounded by a community of Christian women
actively engaged in uplifting their families and communities. These
women were as much concerned with enlightening the mind as they were
with saving the soul. At a statewide convention of Baptist women, the
local group to which Anna belonged urged members to “do all in our
power to foster education.”4 Trained as a teacher herself, Anna instructed
all three of her own children in grammar, writing, and speech before they
entered school.
For Anna Ross Baker's daughters, it was important to be ladylike as
well as to be learned. Female respectability was coveted and cultivated
by middle-class black women of her generation. Ella and her sister,
Maggie, were tutored in etiquette, proper grooming, and deportment.
They were expected to conform to conventional standards of female
respectability as they pursued their studies and practiced their religion.
At the same time that Baker was encouraged to strive to be exceptional,
she was also constantly reminded that humility and service to others
were Christian virtues incumbent upon those who enjoyed academic
opportunities and middle-class status. In the early-twentieth-century
South, women like Anna and Ella were imbued with the conviction that
their relative privilege carried with it a fundamental obligation to work
for the improvement of their race and, especially, to better the condition
of the many women and children who were denied such advantages.
The Ross-Baker family belonged to that stratum of black people who
saw themselves as representatives of the race to the white world and as
role models for those less fortunate within the black community. To
borrow the historian Glenda Gilmore's term, they were the “best men”
and “best women.”5 Many black people who occupied positions of some
class advantage received what the historian Stephanie Shaw has called a
“mixed message—rendering a person part of and apart from the group.”6
Ella Jo Baker's life is marked by the working-out of this paradoxical
position: she drew on the strengths of her childhood community, rejected
the strictures of middle-class womanhood and the dominant ideologies of
her society, and affiliated herself with the poor black people whom she
saw as the most oppressed and the most able to transform the world
through collective action. Formed by who her people were when she was
a child, Ella Baker ultimately chose her own people. In the years after
she left North Carolina, Ella Baker embraced some aspects of her early
socialization and rejected others, yet she carried vivid memories of her
childhood with her and reinterpreted their meaning as she grew and
changed. To understand the complex social environment that nurtured
Baker's early social conscience and her evolving identity as a woman, an
intellectual, and a political activist, this chapter and the next explore
central themes in her childhood and education. These themes include the
central role of religion in women's sense of self and in their mission in
the world; intraregional southern migration in search of economic
opportunity and to escape Jim Crow in its most virulent, urban form; the
importance of language and education; and the multiple meanings of
family and community. The chapter takes up these themes that Ella Jo
Baker encountered and interprets them in relation to her development,
but it does not present them entirely from her point of view. Rather, the
facts of her life are set in historical context, and the way in which Baker
remembered the past is sometimes juxtaposed with my own historical
perspective.
SPREADING THE FAITH AND UPLIFTING
THE RACE
Religion, specifically black southern Baptist religion, was a major force
in Anna Ross Baker's life, and consequently it became a major force in
Ella Baker's life. “I was young when I became active in things and I
became active in things largely because my mother was very active in
the field of religion,” Baker reflected at the age of seventy-five.7 Anna's
strong belief in God went hand in hand with her conviction that faith
must be translated into deeds. At a statewide convention of her Baptist
women's group, she admonished others to “let Christ take the first place
in your vocation and life. Inquire of the Lord what he would have us do.
Let us stay on the job for Christ.”8 In a more general sense, the church
was one of the social and ideological bedrocks of the rural southern
black community in which Ella Baker grew up. Religion was important
to her family in particular, and it was a defining feature of the
community and culture of which they were a part. According to Eric
Anderson, a historian of North Carolina, in the Second Congressional
District, which included Littleton, “Protestant Christianity . . . permeated
the district, touching people's lives more steadily than any other
institution. . . . The very pervasiveness of religion obscured its
boundaries with politics, society, and work.”9
The Baker children were deeply immersed in the black Baptist
tradition. Although Ella and her two siblings were never required to
attend church services more than once a week, as many other devout
southern Baptist families were accustomed to doing, they were drawn
into the wider religious world in which the Ross family played an active
leadership role.10 Anna's family was so religious that all of her six
brothers were named after Christ's disciples: Luke, Mark, John, Peter,
Paul, and Matthew.11 Ella's uncle Luke was president of the Warren
County Sunday School Association, and her maternal grandfather,
Mitchell Ross, served as a minister.12
Ella and her siblings frequently accompanied their mother to local and
regional missionary meetings. “My mother was an ardent church worker
. . . and the women had developed a state conference and [they] had
regular meetings, and I had been to all these kinds of things,” Baker
recalled.13 Ella actually participated in the programs on several
occasions, reciting poems and reading from biblical texts. These
auxiliary associations had been formed, Baker explained, in order for
“the women … to be able to have some identity of their own.”14 At these
meetings she observed not simply ritualistic expressions of faith but also
the business of applying religious principles, particularly the principle of
Christian charity, in the real world. The missionary association
sponsored an orphanage, aided the sick and elderly, funded scholarships
for black college students, and provided aid to local, church-affiliated
grammar schools.15 Ella witnessed this important work being organized
and carried out by confident, competent, and committed African
American women. These women's groups operated with a considerable
amount of autonomy. Women conducted their own meetings, managed
their finances, and made policy decisions. Many members drew their
daughters into these activities, Baker recalled; “they also would carry
their young who could articulate.”16 These women's collective example
of strength and activism had a profound effect on Ella Baker.
Anna Ross Baker and her sisters in the church preached and practiced
an activist, woman-centered faith, which was similar to the Social
Gospel doctrine being espoused by white Protestant denominations
around the same time.17 Although they were predominately middle class
and imbued with a maternalist, missionary objective to “Christianize”
their less fortunate brethren and sistren, these devout black Baptist
women were more than elitist charity workers. Through home visits and
reading groups called “Bible bands,” they forged personal, cross-class
relationships with the poor and illiterate members of their communities.
They did not confine their work to prayerful study and community
service; they extended their mission to secular affairs, advocating
antilynching legislation, crusading for temperance, and challenging
segregation. Theirs was an activist religion that urged women to act as
positive agents for change in the world.18
Ella Baker's mother was a part of a generation of educated southern
black women who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
began actively to assert themselves as a group to be reckoned with inside
the black Baptist Church. The National (Black Baptist) Woman's
Convention, formed in 1900, reflected the consolidation of local and
regional efforts by black Baptist women, many of them missionaries, to
play a more active role in the life of their church and community. The
North Carolina Convention, to which Anna Ross Baker belonged, was
affiliated with the Woman's National Convention and sent two delegates
to its annual meetings.19 According to the historian Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham, their collective mission and worldview constituted a type
of feminist theology, one that “challenged the ‘silent helpmate’ image of
women's church work and set out to convince the men that women were
equally obliged to advance not only their race and denomination, but
themselves… . Within a female-centered context, they accentuated the
image of woman as saving force, rather than woman as victim. They
rejected a model of womanhood that was fragile and passive, just as they
deplored a type preoccupied with fashion, gossip, or self-indulgence.
They argued that women held the key to social transformation.”20 This
description fits Anna Ross Baker perfectly.
Ella Baker's mother was intimately involved in this movement; she
identified with its activist, woman-centered philosophy and strove to
instill in her daughters the desire to mold themselves in the images of
strong, intelligent, and socially engaged black women. Ella deeply
admired her mother's fortitude and compassion. Years later, in the secular
context of the political and civil rights organizations with which she
worked, she emulated her mother's example of zealous and selfless
service on behalf of those victimized by injustice and social inequity,
albeit in a different language and with expanded political objectives.
The southern black Baptist women's missionary movement embodied
the “lift as we climb” approach to community service, as did the
National Association of Colored Women's Clubs founded in 1896.21 As
some members of the race excelled and progressed, it was their duty to
help others along and to contribute to the welfare of those less able and
fortunate than themselves. This responsibility to serve the community
was derived as much from a sense of class distinction as from a sense of
moral duty. Yet for African American women the relationship between
class status and moral obligation was a reciprocal one; indeed, staunch
religious faith and selfless service to others was one way in which a
woman and her family could attain a respectable, even elevated position
within the community. Embedded in uplift ideology was a certain degree
of elitism, along with a sense of class prerogative on the part of middleclass blacks who felt they should act as race ambassadors toward white
society and as moral police and social workers inside the black
community.22
Elitism coexisted with a commitment to equality, so black women's
organizations could support cross-class relationships as well as reinforce
class distinctions. While Anna Ross Baker's sisters in the church saw
themselves as distinct from ordinary black folk, they rejected elitism in
their rhetoric.23 Leaders of the black Baptist women's movement often
railed against individuals for whom charity work was an avocation rather
than a vocation. Nannie Helen Burroughs, a leader of the black women's
convention movement, condemned the socialite who “smoothes her wellgloved hand while she studies the ‘wonderfully interesting slum
problem’ as a diversion.”24 Instead, they embraced the masses of less
fortunate black people and made sacrifices, both material and personal,
in order to provide assistance. Missionary women who were advocates of
temperance, modesty, and propriety also embraced the principle of
providing aid to the downtrodden, irrespective of their status, their sins,
or their inadequacies. This was a concept that Ella Baker accepted,
internalized, and carried with her for the rest of her life.
The women's missionary movement stressed the importance of handson service to those in need; their approach was one of active
intervention. This orientation was consistent with the ethos of mutual aid
that had shaped black communities since slavery and Reconstruction.
Ella Baker remembered her mother being called upon late at night to
come to the aid of other members of the community: “Mama was always
responding to the sick.”25 According to the mores of the southern black
Baptist women's movement, the duty to help others was serious,
immediate, and practical. Anna Ross Baker exemplified that view.
The value that Baker's mother placed on concrete service to others is
illustrated in two stories that Ella Baker later told about her childhood.
The Powell family rented a farmhouse on land that Baker's family owned
in Littleton. The mother had died, and the father was too overwhelmed
and impoverished to care for the children properly. So it was Ella's
responsibility to visit the children's home regularly, bathe them, comb
their hair, and bring their dirty clothes back for her mother to wash.26
This hands-on approach to service required an intimate identification
with those being served. In the second story, those who suffered were
regarded as neighbors even though they lived on the other side of town.
Ella was restless, curious, and a bit of a wanderer, so she often drifted far
from home despite her mother's disapproval. On one such roaming
adventure Ella encountered Mandy Bunk, whose parents were mentally
ill and who lived in squalid conditions on the outskirts of Littleton. As
Ella was walking past the Bunks' house, she noticed that Mandy was
standing on her porch bleeding. Ella went home immediately and
retrieved her mother to help: “She needed medical attention. So what do
you do? I mean, she was a person. You couldn't just pass by her and say,
‘oh, that's just Mandy Bunk, you see, who also raised her pig in one
room and herself in the other room.’ You don't do that.”27 The lesson
Ella Baker took from these experiences was that the poor and afflicted
were not a caste of contaminated or contaminating “untouchables.” They
were not some reified and depraved “other,” but rather an extension of
self, a concept she articulated quite eloquently in later years.
While black Baptist missionary women at the turn of the century
defended their place in the public sphere and in the work of the church,
they accepted and valued women's primary roles as mothers,
homemakers, and wives.28 Like other women's groups, black women's
organizations sometimes described their public, political work as an
extension of their role in the household. One piece of literature declared
metaphorically: “The task of our Baptist women is like a housewife, a
hard piece of work. We are to continue humming until the Lord says
‘enough done.’”29 For southern black women, this perspective was more
than a justification of their public role; it was also an expression of the
extent to which family, kinship, and community overlapped in African
American society. Ties of extended family and fictive kinship helped
bond Ella Baker's childhood community together and shaped her family's
interdependent relationship with a larger network of neighbors and
friends. Collective parenting was a commonplace practice. Ella's mother
did not hesitate to feed, clothe, and discipline other people's children
when the need arose. And Ella's aunt Eliza unofficially adopted and
raised several children who were not biologically her own but were in
need of parenting.30 This practice is an example of what Patricia Hill
Collins, a feminist sociologist, describes as the African American
concept of “other mothers,” whereby a child is nurtured by female
relatives or neighbors when the child's biological parents cannot do so.31
According to Baker, family was defined broadly rather than narrowly.
She “had a family who placed a very high value on people. We were the
kind of family that was not just my mother and her brood, but if
somebody came by who needed something, you got something.”32
Ella Baker's most enduring image of her mother was as an unbending
tower of strength. Anna Ross Baker was very conscious of presenting
herself as a “lady”—poised, graceful, and precise in her speech—but
ladylike behavior did not mean feigning weakness or frailty. It meant,
instead, asserting and defending her dignity. In a 1974 interview, Baker
described her mother as a “feminist.”33 Five years later, she remarked
that her mother “would have been very much at home leading a feminist
movement,” and she described Anna Ross Baker as a firm, authoritative
person who commanded respect from those around her.34 In many
references to her mother, Baker stressed that she was a “precise-spoken”
woman with a large “ego.”35 In using the term “ego,” Baker did not
appear to suggest that her mother was self-centered or vain. Rather, she
was strong, determined, and unwavering in her self-confidence. She
carried herself with dignity and self-respect and insisted that others treat
her in a similar manner. One story Baker told epitomizes her mother's
attitude. Once, when a white salesman came to the Bakers' door and, in a
paternalistic gesture that was common in those days, referred to Anna
Ross Baker as “aintie,” she sharply corrected him, pointing out that they
were certainly not related. “I didn't know my brother had a son like you,”
she snapped.36 As far as Ella Baker could remember, her mother showed
no deference to white authority and very little deference to male
authority. Baker's mother was the strong-willed disciplinarian of the
family who did not mince her words or tolerate disrespect from her
children. Her father was quiet and nurturing, a reversal of conventional
gender attributes.37
Another influential female role model for Ella Baker during her
childhood in North Carolina was her maternal grandmother. Josephine
Elizabeth Ross, called Bet for short, was a rebellious spirit who, despite
a very arduous life, lived to be nearly ninety-six years old. Ella Josephine
Baker, called Ella Jo for short, was her grandmother's namesake. Baker
recalled being told that her maternal grandmother, who had been born
into slavery, was named after two queens, Josephine and Elizabeth.
Baker remembered her grandma Bet as a feisty, fun-loving person who
always enjoyed the company of children and was ever ready to engage
her grandchildren in a game of catch ball or a lively discussion. This
demeanor was in contrast to Ella Baker's mother, who was always very
sober and serious.38
According to Ross family lore, as a slave Bet had actively resisted
attempts by her owners to deny her autonomy as a person and
specifically as a woman. She was herself the product of an illicit sexual
encounter between a master and one of his young female slaves. Indeed,
Bet's mother was allegedly poisoned by the master's wife because she
was jealous of the liaison that had taken place between her husband and
his slave, of which the young Bet was a constant reminder.39 The sexual
violation of enslaved black women by white men, which was often
repeated from one generation to the next, was a central fact of American
slavery. How enslaved women and their kin responded to and
remembered such acts is deeply revealing of their stance toward
personhood and womanhood. As the story was passed down in the Ross
family, Bet was raised by her own grandmother. When she was old
enough to go to work, she was assigned to the master's house, where her
duties would be less physically grueling than the field work performed
by the majority of the slaves. However, Bet's life was hardly devoid of
the oppressive conditions faced by her darker-skinned counterparts in the
field. One specific event illustrates her vulnerability and the fact that,
even though she was the master's biological child, she was first and
foremost a slave. According to Ella Baker, “[W]hen she [Bet] was of
marriageable age, … the mistress wanted to have her married to a man
whom we knew as Uncle Carter… . And she didn't like Carter. And so
when she refused to concur with the wishes of the mistress, the mistress
ordered her whipped, but the master, who was still her father, refused to
have her whipped… . But he did put her out on the farm and she even
had to plow … she would plow all day and dance all night. She was
defiant.”40 After she refused to marry Carter, Bet chose Mitchell Ross
instead. Even under the abject conditions of slavery, Bet pushed against
the will of her slave mistress and master to define her own humanity. She
took great pride in retelling this story to her grandchildren.
Bet Ross shared many stories with her grandchildren. Baker
remembered her grandmother's powerful tales of the suffering and
struggle she had witnessed over her long life. She was a “raconteur,”
Baker recalled, “recounting what took place during her period of
slavery.”41 The tales of slavery and Reconstruction passed down by the
Ross and Baker families instilled in the young Ella the value of personal
and political resistance and impressed on her the fact that chattel slavery
was not ancient history but a mere generation away. What Baker
remembered about her grandmother's stories was not the brutality and
degradation of enslavement but the resistance and the triumphs.42
Although the Ross and Baker families attempted to shelter their children
from the harsh realities of racism that surrounded them, they did not
deny or attempt to conceal the more brutal aspects of the past. Instead,
they passed on stories of defiance in the defense of dignity. What was
instilled in young Ella Baker by the family's storytelling tradition was
not only that she was the descendant of slaves; but that she came from a
long line of militant fighters.
THE PROMISE AND PERILS OF LIFE IN
NORFOLK
Blake Baker and Anna Ross were married in 1896,43 the same year that
the Supreme Court's historic Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the
constitutionality of racial segregation and enshrined the “separate but
equal” justification for Jim Crow. In the wake of this decision, color lines
were drawn in what many thought was indelible ink, inscribed by a
battery of local ordinances and regulations that penetrated virtually every
aspect of life. In 1903, the year of Ella Baker's birth, the scholar-activist
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “[T]he problem of the Twentieth Century is the
problem of the color-line.”44 Ella Baker's parents began their married life
at the nadir of race relations in the post-Reconstruction South, and they
raised their children amid the harsh realities of segregation, political
disenfranchisement, and racist violence.
Both of Ella Baker's parents were natives of eastern North Carolina.
The Rosses lived in Elams, a riverside community just outside Littleton,
and the Bakers lived in the nearby county seat of Warrenton.45 Blake and
Anna met in secondary school in Warrenton, struck up a friendship, and
began to court. Although both came from large families, were the
offspring of former slaves, and were the eldest son and daughter in their
respective families, their backgrounds were otherwise quite different.
Blake's parents were illiterate and landless,46 while Anna's parents were
literate landowners.
Blake and Anna were ambitious for themselves and for their children.
They dreamed of a better life than white Americans thought they, or their
children, deserved. They studied, worked hard, relocated, and endured
painful separations in order to realize a small part of that dream. They
were by no means members of the “black bourgeoisie,” a group that the
sociologist E. Franklin Frazier characterized as coveting their privilege
and distancing themselves from the mass of ordinary black folk.47 But
the Bakers were not poor either. They persisted in their optimism, despite
an often bleak social climate, that they would make some progress in
their own lives and benefit the race in the process. To a certain extent,
they did both.
As the agricultural base of the South shrank in the early 1900s, tens of
thousands of African Americans migrated from farms to cities, leaving
behind their plows and hoes for jobs as Pullman porters, service workers,
and domestic servants. Ella Baker's parents were among them. Like
many others from eastern North Carolina, both black and white, the
Bakers migrated to the bustling port city of Norfolk, Virginia, because it
was the nearest “big” city to their home, with a population of over
50,000 in 1900.48 By the turn of the twentieth century, the city had
become the heart of commercial activity in the region. “With a deep
harbor and a strategic location at the confluence of the Chesapeake Bay
and the Atlantic Ocean, the city's fortunes as a commercial center were
on the rise” after the Civil War. Between 1880 and 1900, capital
investment increased tenfold, and the labor force quintupled. Hundreds
of trains and boats passed through Norfolk's harbor and along its
roadways, transporting cotton, coal, and other commodities from the
South to the markets and manufacturing centers of the North. Many of
those who came to work in the city were African American. The city's
black population had risen to nearly 46 percent by 1870.49
Norfolk was a place very much in flux when Blake and Anna Baker
arrived. The racial politics of the city were undergoing a dynamic
transformation as the economy boomed and its population grew. Norfolk
was a mecca for new migrants because of its vital commercial base and
many employment opportunities. However, for black residents, what
may have looked like a promised land from afar looked quite different
close up. Norfolk's neighborhoods became increasingly segregated, and
the black and white communities became more polarized and insular.
Three factors made the climate in the city more difficult for blacks after
the turn of the twentieth century: the imposition of a strict system of Jim
Crow segregation; the move toward black disenfranchisement in the
wake of Reconstruction; and dramatic incidents of racist vigilante
violence.
Between 1890 and 1910, according to historian Earl Lewis, “Jim
Crow society slowly enveloped daily life.” City ordinances mandating
the segregation of public accommodations were passed one after another,
circumscribing and even eliminating black residents' access to public
facilities. For example, a 1906 ordinance enforced segregated seating on
city street-cars.50 Imposing the new Jim Crow laws and extracting the
subservience they demanded from black men and women in Norfolk was
not an easy task. A 1910 newspaper headline read, “Judge Fines Insolent
Negro $25” for “insulting” a white woman on a public bus. City
ordinances required blacks to defer to whites in all aspects of public life,
and humiliating treatment was routinely meted out to those who
resisted.51 None of these developments was unique to Norfolk; the city's
policies paralleled the evolution of racial politics throughout the South in
this period.52
White Norfolkians also took steps to minimize black political
participation. The 1901-02 Virginia state convention passed an
“understanding clause,” which required that voters prove their
understanding of the Constitution as a condition of suffrage and that
prospective voters pay a poll tax. Both measures were designed to limit
the black electorate, and they did. In 1901, 1,826 African Americans
voted in Norfolk. By 1904 the number was down to 504, and by 1910
only forty-four blacks paid the tax required to vote. Moreover, between
1904 and 1908 white reformers eliminated the city's ward system, which
weakened the voting base of black politicians and effectively eliminated
African American candidates from local politics.53
The physical exclusion and political marginalization of African
Americans in Norfolk was underwritten by frequent public incidents of
antiblack mob violence. Race riots were quite common in southern
cities; Atlanta and Charleston also experienced major riots during the
first decade of the twentieth century. Norfolk experienced its worst race
riot in 1910, when whites randomly attacked black residents as
retribution for the victory of the black prizefighter, Jack Johnson, over a
white contender.
During that Fourth of July weekend, while some of Norfolk's white
citizens celebrated the ideals of freedom and independence, its African
American residents feared for their lives. Incensed by the black
heavyweight boxer's triumph, enraged whites took to the streets to vent
their anger and indignation and reaffirm by collective violence the sense
of white superiority that had been lost in the ring. Blacks were pulled
from streetcars and beaten mercilessly. Others were chased down
alleyways and pummeled by jeering crowds. Most of the trouble was
apparently initiated by white sailors whose ships were docked in the
Norfolk harbor. Local newspapers reported that “every boat brought
fresh batches of sailormen looking for trouble. Negroes were being
attacked and mauled everywhere.” The riot left forty people injured and
over 200 in jail. Similar outbreaks of antiblack violence occurred in
several other cities in the wake of the Johnson victory.54
The Baker family moved to Norfolk in search of economic
opportunity, as did many other African Americans from rural areas, and
they witnessed the increasingly violent efforts that white residents made
to maintain white supremacy in the city as its black population swelled.
Blake Baker moved to Norfolk in about 1895, a year before he and Anna
were married. As was the pattern with many black migrant families, one
person went ahead to secure a job and a place to live before sending for
the rest of the family. Blake initially found a job as a boatman and got a
room in a house at 85 St. Paul Street.55 Two of Anna's brothers, Peter
and Matthew, also migrated to Norfolk around the same time. Matthew
and Blake moved in together, sharing a small house at 102 Scott Street,
around the corner from where Blake had lived the year before.56 Peter set
out on his own and eventually established a successful dairy farm just
outside town.57 Within a few years, Blake was able to find a better
paying job as a waiter on a steamship run by one of the many steamship
companies based in Norfolk. He earned a decent wage and enjoyed what
was, at the time, considered a relatively comfortable standard of living.
The only disadvantage of the job was that Blake had to be out of town
several nights a week as the steamer shuttled back and forth between
Norfolk and Washington, D.C.
Blake and Anna were wed in 1896. She left her teaching job and her
family in North Carolina and moved to Norfolk to settle down with her
new husband in the small house on Scott Street. The neighbors were a
diverse group of black Norfolkians. With the exception of the white
grocer down the block and a few other white-owned small businesses,
the entire community was black. The people who lived in the Baker
family's neighborhood included Mr. Jordan, a barber who lived two
doors down; Nelson Darden, a longshoreman; Joe Stokes, a carpenter;
and Mr. Petty, a shoemaker. Norfolk was a growing community, and
between 1897 and 1900 several new houses were constructed on the
Bakers' block.58
Starting a family was not easy for the Bakers; the three children who
survived infancy were born over a period of seven years. Anna
experienced at least two unsuccessful pregnancies before the birth of
Ella's older brother, Blake Curtis, on December 23, 1901. Two
Decembers later, Ella Josephine arrived. A second son, Prince, died in
infancy when Ella was about three. Anna had at least two other
unsuccessful pregnancies, ending in miscarriage or stillbirth, over the
years. The Bakers' youngest child, Margaret Odessa (Maggie), was born
in 1908.
By 1910, the growing family had moved into a bigger house, which
they rented, on the corner of Lee and O'Keefe Streets.59 This
neighborhood, where Ella lived until the age of seven and which she
remembered most vividly, was a newly developed, “colored” section of
town called Huntersville. Most of her neighbors there were educated and
owned their own property. They were skilled workers, professionals, and
small entrepreneurs.60 There was also a concentration of maritime
workers, like Ella Baker's father, who worked as porters and waiters for
various shipping companies based in the port city. Baker remembered
Huntersville as a more middle-class neighborhood than the older section
of town where the family had previously lived.61
One neighbor in particular made a strong impression on young Ella
Baker. Known as “the Black Money King,” he was probably Dennis
Alston, a North Carolinian who, like Ella's parents, had relocated to
Norfolk.62 Baker remembered him as a dignified man who was very
dark-skinned and was coincidentally one of the most prosperous African
Americans in town. “He was a very proud and very well-groomed man,
[with] sharp features. I guess he struck me as a Zulu might, a strong, tall
type.”63 This combination of qualities had great appeal to Ella Baker.
One day while young Ella was swinging on her front gate, as was her
habit, she saw the impressive Mr. Alston passing by, and they began to
chat. A friendly, assertive, and precocious child, Ella was always looking
for a good conversation. She described herself in retrospect as “one of
these talking children … one who insisted on being able to talk to
people.”64 And she liked talking to Dennis Alston. She liked him so
much she decided to ask him to become her godfather, even though her
family was devoutly Baptist and he was not. He reminded her of her
beloved grandfather, Mitchell Ross, who had recently died. Like her
grandfather, “he prided himself on being black.”65 Later Baker likened
Alston to the regal African statesman Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya.66 Ella
Baker's adoration of Alston's dark complexion suggests a type of black
pride that seems to have been typical in her family. This appreciation for
African characteristics is significant because at that time a
disproportionate number of well-to-do blacks were light-skinned, and in
some circles light skin and straight hair were celebrated as marks of
superiority and beauty. Ella's notion of beauty was clearly different.
When Alston approached Ella Baker's mother regarding the
possibility of her becoming his godchild, Anna was not impressed with
Alston's good looks or regal demeanor. She was outraged that a
Presbyterian would ask a Baptist to change denominations. Becoming
Alston's goddaughter would have meant that Ella would be baptized, and
the practice of baptizing infants and children violated Anna's religious
convictions. Her response bespoke her pride and was a reflection of what
Ella repeatedly referred to as her mother's “ego.” Anna told Alston in no
uncertain terms that her own father “would turn over in righteous
indignation in his grave if he thought that any of his children or his
children's children had gone from the Baptist Church to the
Presbyterian.” Baker described this kind of response as characteristic of
her mother: “You see, her ego was just as great as his, as the man who
wanted me as his god-child but [wanted me] christened in his church.”67
Anna Ross Baker was a woman of strong opinions who did not hesitate
to express those views. Her eldest daughter displayed this very same trait
as she matured. Throughout her childhood, Ella observed her mother
carry herself with dignity and a strong sense of self-confidence in her
interactions with blacks and whites alike.
Anna Ross Baker's strength and determination notwithstanding, the
years in Norfolk were not easy ones for the Baker family. Blake was
away from home a lot, and Anna missed North Carolina. The five tragic
losses of children that Ella's parents experienced took their toll, both
physically and emotionally. One of the saddest events in Ella's youth was
the death of her infant brother, Prince. “This was the first death I knew of
in the family,” Baker later recalled. “I remembered it in particular
because my father was the only one who went to wherever the
internment was taking place. And it was a carriage, and I was very eager
to be in the carriage, but they didn't permit me to go.”68 Anna Ross
Baker suffered from a respiratory ailment, most likely chronic bronchitis,
which grew worse during the family's years in Virginia. Ella herself was
not always healthy either. When she was about six years old, she was
afflicted with typhoid fever and suffered a long and difficult recovery.69
Anna Ross Baker never felt quite at home in the city. Baker recalled:
“My mother didn't like Norfolk.”70 Even with a steady stream of guests
visiting from North Carolina, she was still homesick. Most summers,
Anna would take the children back to North Carolina for an extended
vacation lasting several months, and they would return to Norfolk in the
fall.71 This seasonal shuttle between city and country was typical of
many recent migrants; it reflected their ambivalent feelings about leaving
behind the calm pace, familiarity, and sense of community associated
with rural and smalltown life for the hectic impersonalism of the city.
The same ties of kinship and friendship that brought blacks to the city to
settle or just to visit also took them back to the country, where their
“people” were an anchor and support in times of personal tragedy and
illness, as well as during economic difficulties and vigilante violence.
Anna did not work outside the house after she moved to Norfolk,
which may have intensified her sense of isolation. Baker recalled that her
mother did not even consider resuming her teaching career, largely
because Blake did not want her to. Like many men of his generation,
black and white, he wanted to feel that he could provide for his family
without his wife having to work.72 African American men not only
accepted the prevailing notion that breadwinning was central to
masculinity but also worried about the insults their wives might
encounter in working for whites. While it was not socially acceptable for
middle-class women to go out to work, most black families needed the
income that married women's employment could provide. So it was
acceptable for wives to take in boarders as a way to supplement the
family income. And this is what Anna did. Boarders were a constant
presence in the Baker home. Keeping boarders added significantly to
Anna's burden of household labor at a time when she was often unwell
and occupied with the care of young children.
In 1910 the Baker family—with the significant exception of Ella's
father— packed up and moved back to North Carolina. There were at
least three reasons for the family's decision, one explicit and two
implicit. Anna Ross Baker was determined that the children receive the
best education available to them, a reason for the move that she
communicated clearly to Ella. The 1910 race riot not only jeopardized
the immediate security of black people but also signaled their
increasingly bleak prospects in Norfolk; although Baker never discussed
the race riot, it may have figured in her parents' decision. Third, the
family was drawn back to North Carolina by continuing ties of
obligation to kinfolk at home, which became more pressing after the
death of Mitchell Ross. Blake Baker kept his job on the steamship line
that sailed out of Norfolk, so he visited his family when he could on
weekends and holidays.
Anna Ross Baker was critical of the schooling available to black
children in Norfolk, and she felt that her own native state could provide
her children with a better education and a richer cultural experience.73
Education was an especially significant arena of contest in the Jim Crow
South, as African Americans' academic opportunities were increasingly
limited by white elites' determination to confine blacks to menial,
manual jobs. Anna's father, Mitchell Ross, had taught himself to read and
had instilled in his children the importance of education as a stepping
stone to social advancement. Anna's training and experience as a teacher
meant that she had high standards for what education should provide.
Curtis and Ella enrolled in public school in Norfolk, and Ella was in first
grade by the time the family moved. In 1910 Norfolk had some thirtyeight public schools, eight of them designated for colored children of all
ages.74 There is no evidence to suggest that Norfolk's public schools
were any better or worse than schools in North Carolina. Comments
Baker made later in life, however, suggest that her mother felt more
comfortable with the grammar school in Littleton because she knew the
teachers and the principal and therefore had greater confidence in her
ability to oversee her children's education.
The second likely reason for the family's move back to North
Carolina was the racial violence that increasingly plagued Norfolk
during the early twentieth century. In her recollections of the family's
years in the city, Baker never mentioned the 1910 race riot. It is unclear
whether any members of Ella's family were directly affected by the riot,
but some of their friends and neighbors certainly were. Much of the
rioting took place in downtown Norfolk at the streetcar depot, where
black shipyard workers congregated to catch the trolley back to their
homes after work. It is fair to assume that some of Blake's co-workers
witnessed or were victims of the violence. Everyone was aware of the
race riot, even if they were not personally involved and did not live in
the affected neighborhoods. The mayhem and bloodshed were headline
news in Norfolk papers for over a week.75 Since Anna and the children
customarily spent their summers in North Carolina, they may not have
been in the city when the riot took place, but the adults in the family
were surely well aware of the violence. With Blake away from home so
often, even the confident and capable Anna Baker may have felt
vulnerable.
The death of Mitchell Ross, Ella Baker's maternal grandfather, around
1909 was also a likely factor in the family's move back to Littleton.
Anna's elderly mother, Bet, was living alone. In the Ross family, as with
many southern farm families, black and white, there was a serious set of
inter-generational obligations. It is likely that, as the eldest daughter,
Anna felt a duty to be closer to her mother.
COMING HOME TO LITTLETON
Ella Baker's parents navigated the treacherous terrain of the American
South in the early 1900s in search of the best possible life and fullest
range of opportunities for themselves and their children. The family's
move to Littleton meant a greater physical and emotional distance
between the children and their father. Blake visited the family on
holidays, and Anna would occasionally pack up the children, mainly Ella
and Maggie, and make the trek back to Norfolk to spend a few days with
Blake.76 The children did not see much of their paternal grandparents,
Teema and Margaret Baker, because they lived over a day's ride away,
and Teema Baker died when Ella was still quite young.
Ella Baker's mother and maternal relatives were the main adult
influences in her life after the family came home to Littleton. They
moved into a house owned by one of Anna Ross Baker's sisters, who had
recently moved to Philadelphia, and were closely connected with other
members of the Ross family. This was a woman-centered world. Ella
Baker had vivid childhood memories about growing up with her mother,
her maternal grandmother, and her aunts.77 In the small towns of
Littleton and Elams, which was just across the river, Ella Jo Baker's
maternal relatives were pillars of the black community. The Rosses were
not wealthy people, but they were better off than most. Anna was one of
a dozen siblings, and her circle of extended kin was even larger. Mitchell
Ross, the reigning patriarch of the family until his death, had been a
prominent Baptist minister and farmer in Elams.
On January 24, 1888, Mitchell Ross and several of his male relatives
were able to realize the dream shared by black freedpeople throughout
the South in the wake of emancipation: they purchased their own land.
With it they purchased a greater margin of self-respect, independence,
and social mobility for their children and grandchildren. It was a
memorable day in the Ross family's history when Mitchell Ross made
the final installment of the $250 he had contracted to pay for a fifty-acre
plot of land, which was most likely a portion of the plantation he had
once lived on as a slave.78 Two of his relatives, Everett and Plummer
Ross, made similar purchases of smaller, adjacent plots as a part of the
disposition of the estate of William D. Elams, the landowner who may
have been the Rosses' former master. These transactions occurred nearly
twenty years before Ella Baker was born, but the story remained an
integral part of her family's oral tradition for many decades. Ella Baker
was still recounting a version of it nearly a hundred years later.79 The
land was a great source of family pride. Baker sent home a portion of her
first paycheck after she moved to New York to pay off back taxes and to
keep the land from being sold.80
Over the years, the Rosses became successful independent farmers,
escaping the trap of sharecropping that ensnared so many others. They
grew cotton, wheat, and corn and raised chickens and cattle. Their farms
provided them with a certain degree of insulation from the fluctuations in
the economy, since they were always assured of having food on the table.
In recollecting her frequent visits to her grandfather's farm when she was
a young child, Baker remarked that he “had developed an orchard, …
and he had lots of cattle, … [and] a big garden.”81 Land ownership also
offered a bulwark against the very real possibility of economic reprisals
from whites, a constant threat faced by black tenant farmers and
sharecroppers. Although Mitchell Ross's children and grandchildren
occasionally worked on the land, picking cotton and tending to the
livestock, his main objective was that they secure an education. Formal
schooling was a luxury the Rosses, unlike many of their less fortunate
counterparts, could afford.82
The school that Ella Baker and her siblings attended in Littleton was a
two-room grammar school attached to the South Street Baptist Church
and run by Mr. Lonzie (Alonzo) Weaver.83 Weaver was a stern
disciplinarian who led the children in daily prayers and insisted on strict
adherence to school rules and regulations. Although Weaver was clearly
in charge, the two teachers were women: Bertha Palmer, who moved
from Warrenton to Littleton to teach there, and Susie Grundy, a Littleton
native. Church funds helped to establish the school, which was free to
those who attended.84 One of Baker's fondest memories of her schooling
in Littleton was playing on the school baseball team. She reminisced: “I
would rather play baseball than to eat … we had a mixed team of boys
and girls, some much bigger than I, and I played baseball at recess. I'd
take my lunch with me and eat it on the way to school, rather than bother
with having to eat during lunch time.”85
Ella, Curtis, and Maggie attended Lonzie Weaver's modest school for
several years until Ella, apparently the most academically oriented of the
three children, was sent away to Shaw boarding school in Raleigh in
1918. Curtis enrolled in Greensboro Agricultural and Technical College,
and Maggie went away briefly to another, less prestigious, boarding
school.86 “Maggie was the wild one,” the more frivolous and fun-loving
of the two sisters, recalled Maude Solomon, a girlhood friend of
Maggie's.87 Ella was serious and studious. Maggie eventually dropped
out of school, while Ella went on to earn her college degree with honors.
The fact that Ella Baker and her siblings attended school year-round
and went on to secondary school and even college was in stark contrast
to the experiences of many of their peers who were the sons and
daughters of impoverished sharecroppers. Jenny Newell, one of Ella's
childhood classmates in Littleton, remembered that “we went to school
when we could, but papa was on somebody else's land so we had to work
the fields when he needed us… . Ella Jo [Ella Baker's nickname] and
them went to school regular though, and their mama taught them at home
too.”88 Plantation owners discouraged and, in some cases, forbade black
farmers and their children from obtaining an education. The system of
debt peonage that bound so many black peasants depended on their
illiteracy, since share-cropping contracts and accounting were often
fraudulent.89 For tenant farmers' children, such as Jenny Newell,
economic necessity meant that work was a higher priority than
schooling. Ella Baker was well aware that “the tenant farmer class …
were bound more or less by what their owner needed and if it was cotton
picking time, the children picked cotton.”90 Most black youths were not
able to go to high school, not to mention college. The Ross children and
grandchildren enjoyed exceptional advantages.
Ella Baker's family was characterized by a certain flexibility in gender
dynamics, male and female roles, and masculine and feminine attributes.
Although domestic responsibility and childcare fell largely on her
mother and wage-earning fell primarily on her father, her parents did not
exhibit or inculcate the behaviors and attitudes conventionally associated
with males and females. This fluidity may have contributed to Ella
Baker's own construction of a gender identity that was less than
conventional.
As children, Ella and her older brother, Curtis, did not conform to the
expectations that were commonly held for boys and girls. Ella was
always more aggressive and adventuresome. Baker described her brother
as “thin, tall, and not too combative, whereas I was the opposite as far as
being combative.”91 The way Baker remembered her childhood role and
persona, she was a tomboy who stood up to playground bullies and
defended her shy and timid older brother when she had to. Baker proudly
described herself as a tough little kid who rarely backed down from a
fight: “I wasn't big enough to challenge anybody, but I never ran.” She
added, “I was neither girl nor boy in certain ways.”92
Although Blake Baker was the main income-earner and discouraged
his wife from continuing her work as a teacher, Anna was an equal
decision-maker and authority figure in the family. In fact, some of the
key decisions about the family seem to have been made primarily by
Anna, in particular the decision to return to North Carolina for the sake
of the children's schooling. Moreover, given Blake's virtual absence from
the household for most of the year, she was the principal disciplinarian as
well.93 Baker described her mother as having “a sort of matriarchal
approach to young people or to anybody because she was very positive.
She didn't do much playing with you.” She described her father, in
contrast, as mild-mannered and tolerant.94 “He didn't insist on too many
things, because after all he wasn't home except on every other day,” she
recalled. He must have been even less of a presence once the family
moved back to Littleton.95
At the same time that Ella Baker admired her mother's strength and
her father's gentleness, she had a clear sense of the constraints placed on
her mother because she was a woman. Ella seemed determined not to
succumb to the burdens and limitations women suffered as a result of
their sex. In Baker's retrospective view, her mother was an able and
talented woman who had suppressed her own personal ambitions
because of her domestic responsibilities and the sexism she encountered
in society. In recounting her mother's life story, Baker observed: “She
was a very bright woman … and at the time, of course, that she came
along, there were only certain things that women, especially black
women, could do … and so she taught … she never worked after she
married. And then of course children started coming.”96 Ella Baker was
intent on not following the same path. She refused to teach, declined to
have children, and opted for a rather unconventional marriage. Perhaps
Baker's lack of interest in having children had to do, in part, with her
mother's painful experience. Anna was pregnant eight times, suffered
four miscarriages or stillbirths, and lost one child in infancy.97 For many
women of her generation, pregnancy and childbirth were painful and
dangerous.
It is possible that Ella's memories of her mother's painful losses and
unrealized ambitions dimmed any romantic notions of motherhood and
marriage she might otherwise have harbored. When asked why she never
had children of her own, she confessed: “I wasn't interested, really, in
having children, per se.”98 Reflecting with regret on her mother's
unfulfilled aspirations, Baker remarked: “Had she not been female, she
probably would have gone on into something else. But the time was not
yet right for being female and not married … and so she married and I
came along.”99
Baker herself never fully conformed to the dominant society's
prescription for what a woman, especially a black woman, ought to be.
In conversations and interviews, she often downplayed gender issues, yet
in her personal and political life she consciously violated most of the
social conventions that dictated proper feminine behavior. Although she
married during the 1930s, she did not center her life around her husband.
While she never sought the limelight in political organizations and
criticized many of her male colleagues who did, she also refused to play
the role of the silent helper to the prominent male leaders with whom she
was associated, from Walter White in the NAACP during the 1940s to
Martin Luther King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
during the 1950s. Ella Baker was an assertive, outspoken woman of
strong opinions. These traits sometimes made her male colleagues
uncomfortable, but they would have made Anna Ross Baker quite proud.
CLASS AND COMMUNITY
Ella Baker developed a special relationship with her maternal
grandfather, Mitchell Ross, during her extended summer visits to the
family farm in North Carolina while she was still living in Norfolk.
Although he died when she was about six or seven, just before the family
returned home, his influence continued, both because of the close bond
they had developed and because of his enduring imprint on the RossBaker family's position in the church and community. Mitchell Ross
became a great source of inspiration in Baker's life.
A prominent Baptist minister in Warren County, Ross often traveled
to nearby communities to deliver guest sermons, and sometimes he
served several churches at once. His influence and reputation extended
beyond his immediate congregation. Ella was his favorite grandchild.
She would often travel with Reverend Ross in his horse-drawn buggy,
and she was sometimes allowed to sit in a deacon's chair behind the
pulpit while her grandfather preached, a practice that the more socially
conservative Anna Ross Baker thought entirely inappropriate for a young
child.100 But the precocious little girl beamed at the elevated status she
temporarily enjoyed. Ella also liked hearing her grandfather preach.
Ross's preaching style distinguished him from many other southern black
Baptist preachers of his era. According to Baker, he discouraged his
congregation from “screaming and shouting” during his religious
services. “My grandfather didn't care too much for noise in the church …
[T]he story goes that if they began to do a lot of shouting and throwing
their arms, he'd call them by name and tell them to sit down and keep
quiet. And if they didn't, then he had his sons … go and take them up
and sit them outside the church, let them cool off.”101 This practice may
have reflected Ross's disdain for the loud and lively expressions of
religious enthusiasm commonly associated with poor and uneducated
blacks, as well as his emphasis on the substantive content of the sermon.
Ella Baker viewed her grandfather's preaching style as a more genuine
mode of conveying moral teachings than the drama and theatrics that
many popular black Baptist ministers employed. Mitchell Ross had a
special affection for young Ella. Perhaps he saw a bit of himself in this
articulate and willful child, who was insatiably curious, always spoke her
mind, and never backed down from a fight. Although she was no more
than seven, he referred to her as the “grand lady.”102 For the rest of her
life, she strove to live up to his grand expectations.
An independent, hard-working farmer and devout preacher of the
Gospel, Ross was a recognized community leader who was reputed to
have been active in Reconstruction-era politics in North Carolina. He
was an ardent proponent of equal rights and black suffrage and was
sometimes called on to defend those convictions, both verbally and
physically. Ella described her grandfather as a “man who had the nerve
to fight back … and he identified with the struggles of his people. The
thing that was passed on was not subservience. It was always fighting
back. It was said that when [black people] went up to register to vote …
if they [white segregationists] interfered, he and his sons would go up
and stand by the folks if necessary… . This is what fed the lifeline of our
family.”103 Baker took pride in her grandfather's defense of black
citizenship, just as she took pride in her grandmother's defiance of her
owners' attempts to violate her autonomy while she was enslaved.
Mitchell Ross rejected many of the cultural practices that reminded
him of the humiliation and degradation of slavery. Baker said that “he
did not believe in eating certain things that he had eaten during slavery.
He could not eat cornbread as such … and he wouldn't let his wife force
the children to eat cornbread [either].”104 In this respect, as with his
preaching style, Ross seemed to disassociate himself from many popular
black cultural traditions as an affirmation of pride and a symbol of his
own social progress. Ross clearly had compassion for the mass of poor
black people. However, as is the case with many poor people who
achieve a modicum of success, there is a dialectic of affinity and distance
relative to whom and what they have left behind. These tensions reflect
Ross's status as a leader who was part of the people and at the same time
apart from the people; indeed, he may have viewed himself and been
perceived by his kinfolk as slightly above the people. Ella Baker seems
never to have acknowledged these contradictions in the position of her
grandfather, whom she loved without reservation.
Mitchell and Bet Ross continued to fight the injustices faced by black
freedpeople just as they had resisted, on the very same terrain, the
indignities of slavery. The personal and economic choices they made in
the post-Reconstruction years demonstrate their commitment to the
community. For example, the Rosses never regarded the land they
purchased in 1888 as private property in the strict sense of the term.
They viewed it not only as a resource for the economic well-being of
their immediate family but also as a source of stability for the entire
community. Land could serve as a weapon in the struggle against the
white planters' attempts to dominate and control the African American
population. According to Baker, one of the first schools for Negro
children in the Littleton-Elams area after Emancipation was built on land
that Mitchell and Bet Ross donated for that purpose. A small parcel of
the land was allocated to the Roanoke Chapel, which became an
important black religious institution in Elams.105 County records show
that in 1888 Bet and Mitchell Ross donated a parcel of land to the
Roanoke Chapel Baptist Church, some of which may have been
designated for the building of a church school for black children from the
surrounding area.106 During hard economic times, the Ross family felt
called on to make even greater sacrifices. Land not only represented
capital but could also serve as collateral. Baker recalled that the family
farm was mortgaged more than once during the late nineteenth century,
and the money the family borrowed was used to help feed other families
in the community who were less fortunate than the Rosses. There is no
evidence to corroborate Baker's recollections of the aid her family
provided to neighbors; such acts were not written down in public or
church records, however deeply they were inscribed in the memories of
both donors and recipients. But county records do show that the Ross
family's land was mortgaged twice, in 1889 and 1890.107
Cooperation, the sharing of resources, and a strong community spirit
were fundamental values among African Americans. Ella Baker's
extended family was part of a larger network of black farmers in Warren
County, North Carolina, who emphasized self-help and mutual aid as
strategies for survival and the betterment of the race. The cooperative
ethos that permeated Baker's childhood was deeply implicated in
prevailing notions of family and community; it connoted groups of
individuals banding together around shared interests and promoting a
sense of reciprocal obligation, not of individualism and competition.108
For example, African American farmers exchanged goods, services, and
other resources among themselves. Expensive farm equipment was
purchased collectively or used communally; Baker remembered a wheatthreshing machine being used cooperatively. “There was a deep sense of
community that prevailed in this little neck of the woods,” she once
observed. “It wasn't a town, it was just people. And each of them had
their twenty-, thirty-, forty-, fifty-acre farms, and if there were
emergencies, the farmer next to you would share in something to meet
that emergency. For instance, … if there was a thresher around, you
didn't have each person having his own. So you came to my farm and
threshed.”109 Baker retained positive memories of the cooperative spirit
evident in Littleton and Elams.
As an adult, Baker said that the socialist principle—to each according
to need, from each according to ability—was very much in operation in
her childhood community. She “grew up out of more or less kind of a
Socialistic bit of thinking … [but it was] not called such.”110 The
sociologist Charles Payne argues that much of Baker's political work in
her later years was an attempt to rekindle and recapture some of the
communal values and feelings of group solidarity that she so fondly
remembered from her childhood in North Carolina.111 But this is more a
reflection of Baker's values as she looked back than a reflection of the
values that fully characterized her childhood community. By all
indications, members of the Ross family were fair-minded people with a
great deal of compassion for others. Yet Baker's recollections do not
account for the very real class differences that existed within the black
community itself. The cooperative farming practices she described so
vividly were self-help strategies that could only be employed by those
who shared the advantage of land ownership. This network of mutual aid
did not encompass the majority of blacks, who were bound to the land as
tenant farmers. Although poor black tenants' struggle for survival also
led them to adopt a cooperative ethos, they faced much greater obstacles
with fewer material resources than landowning families like the Rosses
did.
Ella Baker's childhood perceptions of her hometown community were
also shaped by its distinct demographic and political history. The towns
of Littleton and Elams were situated in the historic Second
Congressional District of eastern North Carolina. From the 1870s, when
the state's congressional districts were reconfigured, until the early
1900s, when most black citizens were disenfranchised, the Second
District was referred to contemptuously by white southern Democrats as
the “Black Second” because it was one of the few congressional districts
in the nation with a majority-black electorate. Warren County, where the
Rosses and Bakers lived, was considered the “blackest” county in the
district; African Americans made up nearly 70 percent of the
population.112 The formation of the district in 1872 was the work of
racist southern Democrats who gained control of the state legislature in
1870 and moved to isolate black Republicans by lumping a large number
of them in one congressional district, hoping to insure Democratic
victories in the remaining districts of the state. As a result, the Second
District was a Republican stronghold for most of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.113 The black electorate of the Second District
wielded considerable political power, especially relative to their
counterparts in other parts of the state.
The young Ella Baker benefited from a social climate in which the
adults in her immediate circle, in spite of the racism in the larger society,
were able to function on a daily basis with a certain margin of confident
self-determination. Her childhood memories, for the most part, are
devoid of images of enforced black subservience: of the humiliating
gestures of deference exacted from southern blacks in the form of bowed
heads and “yes ma'am” and “yes sir” in the presence of whites. Instead,
Baker recalled a community of proud black people, a number of whom
were educated property owners actively engaged in local and state
politics. These impressions shaped Ella's assumptions about racial
equality and boosted her confidence in herself and black people in
general. While Baker's recollections of life in Littleton were not
representative of the experiences of the majority of black people, they
left powerful impressions in her own mind and therefore contributed
concretely to the formation of her social conscience.
Taken as a whole, the childhood memories that Ella Baker shared
with interviewers later in life characterize Littleton as a rather idyllic
southern town. Her most salient memory of racial conflict during her
childhood involved a young white boy who dared to call her “nigger”
when she was walking through downtown Norfolk with her father at
Christmastime. She turned around and began punching the boy before
her father could intervene. In Littleton, a white sheriff's son who made
the mistake of hurling a racial epithet her way was also made to regret
the error. Ella threw rocks at the boy and chased him off her street. Baker
rarely mentioned specific, personal encounters with racism during her
early childhood, in contrast to her vivid and accurate recollections of
many other childhood events.114
Baker herself concluded that her parents had successfully protected
her from the brunt of southern racism: “The manner in which we lived
sheltered us from the bad aspects of race.”115 This protection created a
space within which Ella Baker's self-esteem and confidence could
flourish. Her parents had fashioned a life for their children that allowed
them to avoid routine contact with whites. Baker recalled: “We did not
come in contact with whites too much… . I was shielded from having
contact with them at an early age… . This was a complete black
community to a large extent. Even the store on the corner, it was Mr.
Foreman's store, he was black. Even the ice cream store was owned by
Mr. Evans… . So, this is the kind of insulation that was provided by the
black people themselves … you didn't have to run afoul of a lot of
insults.”116 The Bakers' residence in an all-black neighborhood with
black-owned stores insulated the children from racism in their daily
lives.
Although most black families endeavored to protect their children
from the humiliation of racial epithets and second-class treatment by
whites, few could afford the luxury. Most black children in the early
twentieth century had to work for wages as field hands or domestics; so
contact with whites could hardly be avoided. Ella Baker's grandfather
had insisted that his children and grandchildren not work for white
people;117 they worked with and under the supervision of their parents
and other family members. The Ross-Baker family could afford to keep
their young people at home, providing them another layer of insulation
from racism.
When “whites only” signs began to pollute Norfolk's public space and
increasing racial violence threatened blacks' physical and psychological
well-being, Anna Ross Baker collected up her children and fled home to
her own people. In the black middle-class section of Littleton, Ella and
her siblings must have been aware of racism, but their daily lives and
formative identities were not strongly shaped by it. Their mother saw to
that. The children read, played music, participated in church programs,
and vigorously pursued their studies at home and at school. Their contact
with whites was limited, and most of those in their circle of close friends
and extended family were educated and relatively comfortable
materially.
The majority of blacks in Littleton were not as protected from the
impact of racial subordination as the Ross-Baker children were. In
Littleton, as in many other small towns throughout the South, black
subservience to white authority was enforced through legislation,
intimidation, and force. Anti-black violence, although not on the same
scale as the urban riots of the day, was a long-standing feature of the
racial order and political tradition of eastern North Carolina. In his study
of racial terror in the North Carolina Piedmont region during
Reconstruction, Paul Escott indicates that, while Warren County was not
one of the hardest-hit areas, Alamance and Caswell Counties, only short
distances away, were the scenes of hundreds of acts of vigilante violence
during the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.118 It is
likely that on a day-to-day basis race relations in Littleton were quite
civil—as long as African Americans stayed in their place, kept their
distance, and did not violate the established conventions of white
supremacy.
Whites praised those whom they perceived as the “good Negroes” of
Littleton. In 1892, the local newspaper made this comment about Henry
P. Cheatham, the “Black Second's” black congressman: “He is a polite
gentleman and is thought well of by everybody. Some of our colored
citizens should take pattern after him. We wish we could speak as
complimentary of all of his color who hold federal offices in this
state.”119 Those colored citizens who were not as “gentlemanly” as Mr.
Cheatham met with a very different response. In a lengthy syndicated
column reprinted in a local Littleton paper, one writer defended lynching
as a necessary bulwark against what he perceived as widespread black
lawlessness.120
In 1897, the Littleton paper described an incident in which two black
men approached the house of Captain J. W. Dempsey, presumably a
captain in the former Confederate army, and asked his wife for food. She
turned them away, and when Mr. Dempsey heard of this “outrage,” he
chased the two men down and beat them both with the butt of his rifle.
The paper recounts the incident as if Dempsey were a hero and his
actions perfectly justified. The article concludes: “They [the two Negro
men] had been convinced [by Dempsey's actions] that it was ungentlemanly and was not permissible to visit a lady in her home, insult
her and demand food.”121 This incident and the report published in the
newspaper reflects the way in which white racism was inflected by
sexuality; any interracial encounter, especially involving a black man
and a white woman, was regarded as a specifically sexual violation of
racial boundaries, and white men's reactions were potentially explosive.
If black men overstepped the limits of the deferential behavior whites
expected, they were targeted for violent retribution.
Race was not the only dividing line in Littleton. Although a strong
web of interdependent relationships bound the African American
community together, it was by no means a homogeneous community free
of class tensions. Baker's recollections on this score deny any internal
conflict among blacks arising from class distinctions: “Where we lived
there was no sense of hierarchy in terms of those who have, having the
right to look down upon … those who didn't have,” she once
commented.122 By other accounts, however, there were palpable class
differences between the haves and have-nots in her hometown. Families
who lived on East End Avenue, the main residential street, were
generally thought to be better off than the majority of townspeople. East
End Avenue is a small, narrow street by contemporary standards and
remains unpaved to this day, but then it was considered a prestigious
address. About 1911, Ella Baker's family rented a big white house on
East End Avenue, with a large, inviting front porch and a pecan tree in
the front yard. Their neighbors included the Brown, Davis, Hill, and
Hawkins families.123
Baker recognized that her closest neighbors, as well as her own
family, enjoyed a higher socioeconomic status than most of their black
contemporaries. She explained:
There was this section where we lived where the blacks, our
neighbors, each had their own place. Next to us was the Reverend
Mr. Hawkins, who in addition to being a minister was a bricklayer.
And [other] men were artisans, like brick plastering and so forth.
And somebody else was a carpenter. So you had at that time an
intermixture. All of the heads of the families and their wives who
lived in the section we called East End were at least literate. They
had been to school somewhere, and many of them had been to
what might have been considered college or an academy.124
Like their neighbors, the Bakers “lived in a six-room two-story house …
[with] a dining room, and dining room furniture, and silver.”125 The
sound of the children playing the piano and the sight of Ella's mother
reading in the living room were well-understood signs of their middleclass status.126
The view from the other side of town was strikingly different. “They
were big-shot Negroes,” recalled Maude Solomon; “some of them were
so biggity they didn't want their wives to go and work for the white folks
like the rest of us.” Solomon saw her own situation in stark contrast to
that of the Ross-Baker clan and their East End Avenue neighbors. She
was born out of wedlock and lived with her mother in a small, two-room
house on Ferguson Street, in a run-down section of town.127 The Baker
children were clearly among the “haves” of Littleton's black community,
and Maude Solomon was one of the “have-nots.” As a child, Ella must
have perceived this class difference and the social distance it involved,
even though her parents and grandparents did not dwell on the
advantages that distinguished them from other black people.
Relationships among African Americans of different socioeconomic
classes in early-twentieth-century Littleton were not static mirror images
of class relations in the dominant white society. Despite visible
differences in wealth, status, and consciousness, the black community
was not sharply polarized along class lines. Living on the poor side of
town did not prevent Maude Solomon from becoming friends with
Maggie. Baker's childhood experiences encompassed the dual class
realities that characterized most African Americans' lives during the
early twentieth century. On the one hand, there was a clear distinction
between the small, elite group of educated black artisans and landowners
and the majority of blacks, who were illiterate or semiliterate, landless,
and relatively impoverished.128 On the other hand, the two groups
generally lived in close proximity and were linked together in their dayto-day activities and by their shared condition of racial oppression.
Ella Baker's family and friends straddled this class divide. While the
Ross-Baker children and their Ross relatives enjoyed certain class
privileges, Ella was constantly reminded that others did not share their
good fortune. Members of her extended family, as well as her
schoolmates and neighbors, suffered the brunt of economic hardship.
And those people were almost as much a part of Ella's life and
consciousness as were her more affluent friends and relatives. “I've been
identified over a long period of time with people, a lot of whom had
nothing,” Baker recalled, “although in terms of my immediate family, we
have never lived out in the streets.”129
Most people on Blake Baker's side of the family were uneducated and
relatively poor. In a social context in which land and literacy were the
two most significant determinants of class status, Ella Baker's paternal
grandparents were clearly at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy.
Her father's name was a tacit symbol of his own proximity to slavery
days. He was named after his father's former master, Blake Baker, a
prominent North Carolina planter and Confederate war veteran. County
estate records that list Teema as an item of property in the inventory of
the white Blake Baker's estate are a chilling reminder of the
circumstances of bondage from which Ella Baker's family had
emerged.130 Even though Ella did not spend much time with her father's
family, they were still very much a part of her consciousness and her
sense of family heritage. Baker was well aware that she was only two
generations removed from slavery and only one generation removed
from the poverty and illiteracy that trapped so many southern blacks. All
of these factors helped to mold Ella Baker's sense of morality, justice,
and social obligation.
Ella Baker's class privilege and the way in which her parents
conceptualized the meaning of that privilege were key factors in shaping
her class analysis of society and her model for political leadership within
movements for social change. Baker's family internalized and inculcated
the notion that from those to whom much is given, much is expected.
Moreover, as good Christians steeped in the African American tradition
of mutual aid, they felt that because they had been “blessed” with good
fortune they were obliged to reach out to those who were less successful
and provide assistance when and where they could. In Baker's words:
“Your relationship to human beings was more important than your
relationship to the amount of money you made.”131 Her family
emphasized the importance of sharing what they had with others. Baker's
recollections move from sharing food to other forms of solidarity: “[My
family was] never hungry. They could share their food with people. So,
you shared your lives with people.”132 To Ella Baker, this became a
matter of moral obligation. A certain degree of elitism remained within
her parents' and maternal grandparents' ethos of Christian charity.
Implicit in this philosophy is the idea that the disadvantaged are not fully
capable of helping themselves. Ella Baker later rejected this assumption
outright, as she came to see what she described as the hidden inner
strength within people and communities that on the surface appeared to
be without resources or recourse.
Baker's parents' and maternal grandparents' sense of community
service seems to have been based on the contradictory notions of duty to
and distinction from the masses of the black poor. The characteristics of
which the Ross-Baker family were most proud were not those things that
linked them to the majority of their fellow African Americans; they took
pride, instead, in what most set them apart: land ownership, education,
and Mitchell Ross's ministerial work. They were landowners at a time
when tenant farming trapped most southern blacks in economic
conditions that resembled slavery. They were literate and educated when
most were not. Their style of religious worship, under Ella's
grandfather's tutelage, consciously distinguished them from the
“screaming and shouting” of most black Christians.133 This is not to
suggest that members of the Ross-Baker family were not genuine in the
help they provided to their disadvantaged neighbors, or that they had
different criteria for success than most of their contemporaries. But their
class consciousness nonetheless stands in clear contrast to the radical
egalitarianism that Ella Baker embraced in her work and life, and that
contrast underscores the evolution that occurred in her own thinking over
time.
As she matured personally and politically, Ella Jo Baker departed
from her family's characteristic posture vis-à-vis the poor and
downtrodden. She eventually adopted the notion that the more
privileged, educated, and articulate members of the African American
community were not only duty-bound to come to the aid of their less
fortunate brothers and sisters, but also had to humble themselves in order
to create the social space necessary for the more oppressed people in the
community to speak and act on their own behalf. Ella Baker built on, but
moved beyond, the religious teachings of her youth. The values of
charitable giving, sacrifice, and communalism that she internalized as a
child became a part of her more secular world view as an adult. She
ultimately identified with the plight of the poor and the working class,
not as a gesture of Christian charity, but as an act of political solidarity.
The choices she made over the course of her life distanced her from her
relatively advantaged class background and merged her own
consciousness and material self-interest with the concerns of the havenots. In economic terms, she “eked out an existence” most of her adult
life.134
Although Ella Baker's childhood experiences did not mold her into
the radical political activist and intellectual she later became, they form
an important foundation and context for our understanding of her
grassroots, group-centered leadership style, her egalitarian vision for a
renewed society, and, perhaps most important, her unwavering
confidence that, as an African American woman, she had both the
capacity and the obligation to be a powerful force for social change.
What that change should be and how it should be enacted were open
questions she grappled with for many years. Ella Baker's upbringing,
rooted in a tradition of pride, resistance to oppression, a deep sense of
community cooperation, and a strong sense of her strength as a woman
left an indelible mark on her character and helped to shape her values,
priorities, and convictions. Her family background instilled a bedrock
commitment to community service, a sense of the usefulness of
cooperative—as opposed to competitive and individualistic— survival
strategies, an awareness of the pitfalls of self-aggrandizement, and the
notion that women, as well as men, had both a right and a duty to be
actively engaged in struggles to make the world a better place. Ella
Baker left Littleton at the age of fourteen to attend Shaw Academy, a
private, church-run boarding school in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Although she never went back to live there permanently, she remained
tied to her hometown for the rest of her life. Her family continued to own
land there, and Baker often retreated to the house where her mother had
lived to work or write—and to reconnect herself with “her people” and
the place that provided her with important political and personal
groundings.135
2 A RELUCTANT REBEL AND AN
EXCEPTIONAL STUDENT
SHAW ACADEMY AND SHAW UNIVERSITY, 1918–1927
I didn't break the rules, but I challenged the rules.
Ella Baker, 1977
Awake youth of the land and accept this noble challenge of salvaging the
strong ship of civilization by the anchors of right, justice and love.
Ella Baker, valedictorian speech, 1927
From 1918 to 1927, Ella Baker lived, worked, and learned on the campus
of Shaw University, a Baptist boarding school and college in Raleigh,
North Carolina. She matured socially, intellectually, and politically in
this environment. Next to the church, Shaw was the most influential
institution in Ella Baker's early life. Anna Ross Baker selected the school
because it met her academic and moral standards. She anticipated that
Shaw would groom her eldest daughter to be both learned and ladylike.
Such qualities would serve her well in the teaching career that Anna
Baker had planned for her upon graduation. The expectation was that
Ella's achievements at Shaw would serve not only her own best interest
but also the interests of her family and community, promoting the
advancement of the race. Ella Baker eventually fulfilled her obligation of
service a thousand times over, but not in the way that her parents
anticipated when they sent her off to school.
Shaw nurtured Ella Baker's intellectual growth at the same time that it
inadvertently fueled her rebellious spirit. Her curiosity about the larger
world deepened as she was exposed to new ideas and broadened her
intellectual horizons. When she was a senior in high school, Baker had
her first confrontation with an authority to which she found it impossible
to defer. The student protests in which she was involved during her later
years at Shaw centered on campus concerns, including the dress code
and the required course in religion. The articulate young woman became
a spokesperson for her peers as they challenged the teachers and
administrators whom they had been taught to respect and not to question.
These formative years marked the beginning of Ella Baker's self-
identification as a rebel and her lifelong work as an intellectual and a
political organizer.
Ella Baker did not need to go to college to learn the value of
community service, humility, and a strong love of knowledge. The RossBaker family had emphasized all of these virtues for as long as Ella
could remember. Language was especially important to Anna Ross
Baker, who taught all three children how to read before they entered
public school. She passed on her talent as a public speaker and her
passion for the spoken word to Ella, coaching her in elocution and
tutoring her in spelling and grammar. Baker recalled that her mother
“had a great appreciation for, and almost a bias for, how people were
able to speak and write.”1 Anna Ross Baker's emphasis on the accurate
use of standard English represented a public expression of the family's
class status and educational achievements.
Anna was so concerned that Ella be adequately prepared to enter
Shaw that she had Ella spend an additional year at a local school
working closely with a tutor.2 Few teachers could meet Anna Ross
Baker's high standards. Baker recalled: “The year before high school was
spent largely with an old time teacher who would fit her [Anna's]
appreciation … I went through all this business with grammar, all the
things you learn in grammar that I couldn't even articulate now … [but]
that teacher was just like my mother. She fit my mother's needs in terms
of how she carried me through all the declensions. She carried me
through all the parts of speech and how they are used.”3
Although Ella Baker sometimes questioned whether Anna Ross
Baker's obsession with proper language was “a good thing or not,” since
it emphasized class distinctions among African Americans, she
recognized that her own proficiency in spoken language and her polished
use of the written word, which were largely a result of the tutelage her
mother provided, gave her a certain power and self-confidence that many
others did not have. “… And I had a big voice to start with,” Baker
reflected.4 Over the course of her life others often admired and
sometimes were intimidated by Ella Baker's use of language. She
wielded words, big and small, as political tools: to make complex ideas
simple, to deliver a cutting-edge criticism, to thwart an attack from the
opposition, or to inspire a comrade to struggle a little harder. One of her
young protégés in the 1960s commented admiringly, “I so much wanted
to be as articulate and eloquent as she [Ella Baker] was. Her words were
always powerful.”5 Anna Ross Baker's passion for language led Ella to
become a skilled speaker and an effective communicator. But Baker saw
rhetorical ability as a potentially double-edged sword. The ability to
impress others with words did not necessarily mean that the speaker had
something substantive to say or that he or she was prepared to translate
those fancy words into deeds. In describing the exaggerated emphasis
placed on speaking and preaching ability in the black church, Baker
observed that orators were unduly “lionized” because of their verbal
prowess.6 Yet Baker's ability to articulate ideas and convictions, both for
herself and for others, enabled her to defend the rights and interests of
those who were less educated and to hold her own against whoever was
standing in the way of the changes she sought.
Shaw Academy and University, like other black colleges, universities,
and normal schools in the South, was founded during the Reconstruction
era in order to promote the advancement of African Americans.7 These
institutions received most of their initial financial support from the
Freedmen's Bureau, northern religious organizations such as missionary
societies, and individual white philanthropists. Shaw was founded in
1865 by the American Baptist Home Mission Society.8 From the outset,
African Americans themselves, despite their obvious economic
disadvantage as freed people, managed to contribute economically to
black educational institutions like Shaw. The North Carolina State
Baptist Convention and local black churches and missionary associations
routinely raised funds for Shaw. This type of self-help activity was
typical of the postemancipation era. Historian Herbert Gutman
emphasizes that “the former slaves themselves played the central role in
building, financing and operating these schools… . Postwar educational
efforts by blacks built upon a firm base of educational activism during
slavery.”9 The Ross family exemplified this tradition. In addition to
paying tuition while Ella was a student at Shaw, Anna Ross Baker
participated in fund-raising campaigns to support the school years after
her daughter graduated, as part of her work with the Women's Auxiliary
Progressive Baptist Missionary Association.10 Most black people in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw education as a pathway
to their goals of freedom and empowerment and were prepared to make
sacrifices to support both elementary and higher education.
Like most black colleges, Shaw was a fairly conservative institution
controlled by paternalistic northern white benefactors. As Baker put it,
“Shaw was founded by the New England white Christians.”11 Northern
missionaries and reformers saw education as a vehicle for preparing exslaves to assume their new roles as hard-working, law-abiding American
citizens. From the end of radical Reconstruction through the
institutionalization of Jim Crow, white administrators of black colleges
accepted segregation and promoted accommodationist views. Whites
with close ties to northern contributors continued to run these colleges
even when a second generation of well-educated African Americans was
prepared to lead them. In fact, Shaw did not appoint its first African
American president until 1931, four years after Ella graduated.12
According to Wilmoth Carter, who documented Shaw's history, the
institution enjoyed several notable distinctions. It was “the oldest
[historically black] institution of higher learning founded in the South,
[and] the first Negro institution in America to open its doors to
women.”13 The tensions between the views and practices of paternalistic
white administrators and the aspirations of students, their families, and
the school's supporters in the black community were intensified by the
fundamental contradiction between the first-rate education offered to
students and the second-class positions they would be forced to occupy
after graduation.14 Institutions like Shaw communicated mixed
messages. Although Shaw's administrators emphasized humility and
Christian service, they reinforced many elitist assumptions about social
class. The exceptional status of its students was a given.
As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham points out in her discussion of
southern Baptist missionaries in this period, institutions like Shaw had
both a radical and a conservative impulse.15 A coeducational classical
curriculum, parallel to curricula at white colleges and universities,
implied that African American men and women were as intellectually
capable as their white counterparts. At the same time, the enforcement of
a strict, middle-class code of conduct created visible markers that
distinguished those who were educated from the majority of the race. At
Shaw, the rejection of notions of innate black inferiority merged with
elitist assumptions about the moral and cultural superiority of those with
education and class advantage. This elitism was tempered, however, by a
strong sense of moral obligation to aid and uplift those who were less
able and to do so with a humble spirit.
A commitment to Christian service was integral to Shaw's mission as
an institution. At Shaw, as at most private colleges, religious instruction
was required by the school's core curriculum. Bible class and daily
attendance at chapel were mandatory. The catalog read: “As Shaw
University is a Christian school, the study of the English Bible is a part
of the regular curriculum. The work is so arranged as to give a
comprehensive knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments.”16 The
official school motto was “For Christ and humanity.”17 Not surprisingly,
all of the school's presidents up to the 1920s were either former
missionaries or ministers.
Shaw's philosophy represented a mix of intellectual elitism and social
conservatism, with a heavy emphasis on selfless Christian service. This
aspect of Shaw's philosophy was consistent with the religious values and
teachings of the Ross-Baker family. The school deemphasized
individualism and stressed community service and Christian charity
instead. “Where I went to school … you went there to give … the best of
yourself to other people, rather than to extract from other people for your
own benefit,” Baker recalled.18 The moral training she received at Shaw
encouraged her to be modest and self-effacing. “My not pushing myself,
as I saw it, came out of the Christian philosophy,” she remarked.19
Selfishness and self-promotion were vices not to be tolerated. Shaw was
the kind of school where students “sang, ‘Others, Lord, yes, others, and
none of self for me. Help me to live for others that I might live like
thee.’”20
The contradiction between Shaw's philosophy of Christian service and
its intellectual and class elitism is epitomized in a statement by its
president, Joseph Leishman Peacock, quoted in the college newspaper in
1925: “college life … includes the opportunity to associate with minds
and hearts of the highest type.”21 Although Shaw's philosophy
discouraged crude displays of snobbery, its administrators and faculty
clearly thought of their students as exceptional, distinct from and, to
some extent, better than the masses of ordinary black people. While most
African Americans saw academic learning as a passport to full
citizenship, the northern white missionaries who directed and supported
schools like Shaw viewed black education as a source of both racial
uplift and social control.22 They hoped to produce a group of moderate
race leaders who would temper black protest and help to instill the
Protestant work ethic in their less-educated counterparts. Members of the
educated black elite regarded themselves both as advocates for and as
educators of their people. They lobbied for resources and rights at the
same time that they urged poor and working-class blacks to uphold
dominant standards of morality in order to demonstrate their worthiness
for citizenship.
The mission of black Baptist colleges like Shaw, according to Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham, was to produce members of what W. E. B. Du
Bois called the “Talented Tenth,” a highly educated cadre of race leaders
who would tutor, lead, and act as ambassadors for the larger black
community.23
Through the Talented Tenth, northern white Baptists hoped to
transform—albeit indirectly—the illiterate and impoverished black
masses into American citizens who valued education,
industriousness, piety, and refined manners… . Through the black
educated elite, the degraded masses would be introduced to the
values of white, middle-class Protestant America… . It was the
men and women of the Talented Tenth who assured race
management—that is, control of the masses— and consequently
the well-being of the nation… . From the northern Baptists'
perspective, a well-educated black vanguard constituted a buffer
between white society and the black masses… . In the event of
rebellion, the Talented Tenth would serve as a critical mediating
force between several million oppressed blacks and white
America.24
Du Bois's conceptualization of the Talented Tenth was distinct from the
visions of white missionaries and other black leaders like Booker T.
Washington, who primarily advocated industrial, manual training for
blacks and accommodation in matters of civil rights. In Du Bois's view, a
classical liberal arts education for a black leadership class could serve as
a means of achieving civil rights for the entire black community. He
rejected segregation and the assignment of all black people to positions
of subordination in the economic, social, and political life of the
country.25 The missionary spirit and the concept of the Talented Tenth
embodied both a genuine commitment to community service and the
improvement of the race and a strong dose of elitism and social
conservatism. Consistent with the school's philosophy, Shaw's
administrators dictated and enforced a very rigid code of conduct for its
students and faculty. Their behavior was to be exemplary enough to earn
them leadership status, a badge of respectability, and membership in the
middle class. Such behavior would supposedly demonstrate their civility
to whites and legitimate their fuller inclusion in the dominant society. It
was also intended to distinguish them from black common folk who
were untutored and unpolished. The school's philosophy was consistent
with the view articulated by Du Bois in the first decade of the twentieth
century: “developing the Best of the race so that they may guide the
Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own
and other races.”26 Since it was considered a privilege to be accepted at
the school, students were expected to be grateful and to behave
accordingly.
In order to be admitted to Shaw during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, an applicant had to be of “unblemished moral
character.”27 Shaw's rules were designed to ensure that students
remained morally above reproach, even as they traversed the dangerous
years of adolescence. The college strictly regulated behavior and
deportment, prohibiting dancing, card playing, and the use of tobacco,
which were common leisure activities among poor and working-class
African Americans. Dress and appearance were especially important
marks of class and sexual respectability for young women. Female
students were not allowed to wear “evening dresses, French heels, [or]
ear rings.”28 Dating and socializing were strictly supervised.29 Students
were reprimanded and disciplined for the slightest violations of school
protocol. Those who left campus without permission or missed chapel
services were routinely disciplined and might even be expelled.30
Students had to make formal requests to be late or absent from classes or
school events, and “no frivolous conversations or attention to trivial
matters or visiting in each others rooms, lounging upon beds or loitering
upon the grounds” were allowed.31 The school bulletin warned that “only
those students who are willing to comply cheerfully with reasonable
rules and regulations are desired at this institution.”32
Shaw offered a comparable list of course offerings to both male and
female students, and classes were mixed rather than segregated by sex.
Still, the school's philosophy held that women's responsibilities centered
on their homes and families, and residential life was organized to ensure
that female students practiced domestic skills. A section of the catalog
titled “Special Requirements for Girls” reads: “A period of work will be
required daily of each girl, under the supervision of a matron, for which
no compensation will be given… . Each girl is required to have aprons
suitable for house and laundry work, and those who wait tables must
have waitresses aprons.”33 The middle-class image of black womanhood
did not preclude public or professional activity, but creating and
maintaining order in the home was seen as a core feature of female
respectability.34
The etiquette that governed interaction between male and female
students at Shaw was quite rigid, and its rules were firmly enforced.
School-sponsored social events were formal and heavily chaperoned.
According to Effie Yergan, a classmate of Ella's, school parties were
“more like banquets than dances.”35 At religious services, “the boys
marched in one line and the girls in another,” and female students
occupied the center aisle while the male students sat on either side.36
Sex-segregated seating at chapel was presumably intended to prevent
informal contact that might distract young people from their prayers.
There were some covert romantic interludes between students, Yergan
said, but these were rare. Students who married secretly were—if caught
—penalized by immediate expulsion.37
Shaw students were forbidden from socializing with the black
community in Raleigh, except in the formal capacity of charity workers
under the supervision of school authorities. Students who were learning
to lead and serve their race had to have some contact with their
uneducated counterparts, but school officials evidently thought that their
interaction had to be closely controlled in order to prevent the masses
from influencing the elite rather than vice versa. Administrators frowned
on casual contact with Raleigh residents, seeing it as detrimental to the
cultivation of respectable, middle-class alumnae. The 1881-82 catalog
states that “no young man or woman from the city, without any
legitimate business, will be allowed to visit the students in their rooms or
mingle with them upon the grounds.”38 The 1927 catalog reads:
“Boarding girls are expected to come directly to school from the train,
and to return directly to their homes at the close of school … [and] are
not allowed to visit in the city during the session.”39 Female students
were even forbidden from visiting family members in the city without
express permission from the University's president, and their monthly
shopping trips were chaperoned.40 These rules drew sharp lines of
demarcation—reflected in appearance and deportment as well as formal
learning—between Shaw's middle-class academic community and the
common people of Raleigh. After her years at Shaw, Ella Baker spent
much of her life trying to break down such divisions.
COMING INTO HER OWN
Ella Baker moved from the secure and somewhat sheltered environment
of home to begin her journey into adulthood at Shaw Academy against
the backdrop of a rapidly changing and increasingly dangerous world. In
the wake of World War I, the meaning of American democracy,
especially as it applied to African Americans, was hotly contested.
Wartime rhetoric called on all Americans to do their part to “make the
world safer for democracy.” And many African Americans did. Two
hundred thousand black men served in the war, a fourth of them in
combat, and all of them in segregated units.41 Blacks remained
disenfranchised at home, and racial violence was on the rise; attacks on
black soldiers in uniform were soon followed by racist violence against
black urban-dwellers. The “Great Migration” of southern blacks to
northern and western cities began during the war and accelerated through
the 1920s. Race leaders debated what strategies ought to be adopted at
such a perilous yet potentially transformative time.42
In office from 1913 to 1921, Woodrow Wilson was the first
southerner to be elected to the presidency since Reconstruction, and he
saw no contradiction between racial inequality and American democracy.
Indeed, he was an unapologetic segregationist; he applauded the racist
film Birth of a Nation and imposed segregation in federal offices in the
nation's capital. There were advances for some and setbacks for others.
In 1920, women finally won access to the ballot. Baker was sixteen years
old and in her third year of high school. Still, millions of African
American women were excluded from the political process, as were most
African American men. Ella Baker began to develop her personal
ambitions and to define her own worldview at a time when the
citizenship rights of women and African Americans were at an important
crossroads.
Of all the southern cities where Ella Baker could have ended up, with
perhaps the exception of Atlanta, Raleigh was probably better than most.
Two famous North Carolinians who came of age in Raleigh a decade
ahead of Baker were Sarah and Elizabeth Delany, two black middle-class
sisters who late in life became the subject of an award-winning book,
Having Our Say. The Delany sisters, older siblings of the Harlem-based
black jurist Hubert Delany, with whom Ella Baker was to become
acquainted, recalled Raleigh as “a center for education,” with two
premiere black colleges to its credit, Shaw and St. Augustine. The
Delany sisters described Raleigh as “a good place for a Negro of the
South to be living, compared to most places at that time.”43 Shaw's
environment was fairly insular, but when students were allowed to
venture out, the environment was less hostile than in other cities in the
Jim Crow South.
Shaw University opened new intellectual horizons for Ella Baker,
exposing her to a myriad of ideas and experiences she had never
previously encountered. The institution's litany of rules, elitist social
milieu, and fairly conventional notions about gender expressed the
values, views, and aspirations that had shaped Ella's education at home;
yet being away at boarding school and college gave her the opportunity
to define herself, to develop an independent identity, and to take a stand
on the controversial questions of the day. Above all, as a first-rate,
comprehensive institution of higher education, Shaw offered Baker
ample opportunity to discover and explore the world of ideas. She took
full advantage of the scholarly expertise and resources made available to
her there, and she excelled academically. Her curiosity was insatiable.
She read the works of Kant, Socrates, Aristotle, and Carter G. Woodson
and studied the lives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and
Sojourner Truth.44 Baker was already a voracious reader who was
enamored of books and delighted in the exchange of ideas when she
came to Shaw. There, as a member of the debate team, she honed her
oratorical skills and grappled with current social issues. Effie Yergan, her
classmate, recalled that Ella “had a heavy voice, and helped to win a lot
of trophies and honors for the school.”45
Ella Baker's most important mentor at Shaw was Professor Benjamin
Brawley. Although Baker enjoyed good relationships with several
faculty members, Brawley had the most profound impact on her
thinking. In addition to teaching a course on Shakespeare, he coached the
debate team and advised the campus newspaper, the Shaw University
Journal, on which Ella also worked. Brawley exemplified the highest
standards of academic excellence, especially in writing for and speaking
to the public.
A meticulous scholar and prolific writer, Brawley wrote some
seventeen books during his life.46 He demanded perfection from his
students and deplored mediocrity. Perhaps it was his high standards of
scholarship that attracted him to the bright and articulate Ella Baker. She
was an exceptional student, and he was a serious scholar. But there was
another side of Brawley that may have particularly impressed young Ella
Baker. A sensitive man, he was committed to racial equality and
community service. He spoke out against racial discrimination and the
second-class status imposed on African Americans of his generation.
Although he came from an upper-middle-class black Atlanta family,
Brawley chose to spend a semester after college working as a teacher in
a one-room schoolhouse in an impoverished black community in rural
Florida. He often shared memories from that experience with his
students at Shaw.47 His stories had a lasting effect on Ella Baker.
Brawley was a legendary figure at Shaw, thoroughly bourgeois in his
manner and a bit of an eccentric. Prim and proper himself, he insisted on
strict adherence to school rules and protocol. He would lock his
classroom door and refuse admittance to students who were more than a
few minutes late.48 One observer remarked that most “students stood in
awe of Brawley. He was precise and exacting in class, immaculate in
dress, frowned on men who said ‘hello’ to women, [and] refused to
attend basketball games because the male players were not sufficiently
clad.”49 He always left his office door open when meeting with female
students to circumvent any possible assumptions of impropriety.
Reminiscing about her college education at Shaw, Effie Yergan
characterized Professor Brawley as “uptight and rigid,”50 two words that
no one who knew Ella Baker later in her life would ever have associated
with her. Yet, despite their contrasting styles and personalities, Baker
developed a fairly close relationship with Brawley. Perhaps he reminded
her of her mother, who had many of the same qualities, especially a
sharp wit and a love of ideas. In her reminiscences, Baker gently mocked
Brawley's elitism and formality, observing that he was “Hah-vahd”
educated and “classic-al-ly inclined.” He was so prudish, Baker recalled
critically, that he even forbade students from reading what she termed
“all the nice salacious things that were in Shakespeare.”51 But Brawley
was a rigorous and compassionate intellectual, and this distinguishing
feature won Ella Baker's enduring admiration. The two kept in touch
long after Ella left Shaw. In the 1930s, when Baker was living in New
York, she invited her old teacher to speak at an event held by the Young
Negroes' Cooperative League (YNCL), which she was organizing at the
time, and Brawley agreed.52
Extracurricular activities were nearly as important to Ella Baker's
intellectual development as her classroom experiences. She began her
journalism career at Shaw in her freshman year of college, when she was
the youngest student contributor to the campus newspaper.53 She then
became associate editor of the Shaw University Journal, a student
publication established in 1924. In 1925 she took over as editor; her
mentor, Professor Brawley, served as the faculty adviser.54 Since she was
curious about all kinds of subjects, journalism became a way for Ella to
raise questions that she otherwise might not have had the opportunity to
ask. She received As and Bs in all of her English and composition
classes, and she seems to have been almost as good a writer as she was a
public speaker.55 These communications skills came in handy when
Baker began her work as a political organizer. Over the years, she would
contribute to such important African American periodicals as the Crisis,
the Amsterdam News, the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the National News,
and the West Indian News.56
Ella Baker's education and experience at Shaw gave her skills and
self-confidence that she drew on throughout her life, especially as a
woman operating in meetings and organizations dominated by men. In
reflecting on what experiences helped to prepare her for her later
political activism, Baker recalled: “My man-woman relationships were
on the basis of just being a human being, not a sex object. As far as my
sense of security, it had been established… . I had been able to compete
on levels such as scholarship… . And I could stand my own in debate.
And things of that nature. I wasn't delicate.”57 So, despite the
conservative norms regarding gender that Shaw tried to inculcate in
students, Ella Baker's education was a source of empowerment that
enabled her to feel confident relating to men as an equal rather than as a
sexual subordinate.
There is no indication Baker took a serious romantic interest in
anyone while she was at Shaw, although she reportedly met her future
husband, T. J. Roberts, when she was enrolled there.58 She was also
rumored to have had a crush on a football player.59 According to her
classmate Effie Yergan, Ella Baker was popular. “She was friendly to
everyone, but I don't think she ever had a steady beau … you know how
men were at that time, and some of them still today, they wanted you to
be beautiful and dumb. [She] was too intelligent for that. The boys were
probably intimidated.”60 Yergan's reminiscences suggest that during her
college years Baker cultivated a persona that enabled her to associate
with men on a collegial basis, keeping them at a certain personal distance
and creating a space in which she could be forthright and assertive.
Shaw provided Ella Baker with a window on the wider world. The
social and intellectual atmosphere of the Shaw campus was enhanced by
the presence of international students and by visiting speakers who
discussed their work as foreign missionaries and world travelers.
According to historian Wilmoth Carter, “Many foreign students came
from Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Congo,
Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana, the Canal Zone, the Philippines and
Puerto Rico.” There were no white students at the school until after
1954.61 Meeting a diverse mix of students from around the world must
have been quite an experience for students from small towns in the
South, many of whom had never traveled outside the state, much less
outside the country.
Ella savored the taste of the world that Shaw offered her. Two people
in particular encouraged her to think of the world in global terms: Max
Yergan, a 1914 Shaw graduate who spent seventeen years in Africa
working for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), and his
wife, who was a teacher at Shaw. Max Yergan later became a close ally
of Paul and Essie Robeson and lobbied for the decolonization of Africa
through the Council on African Affairs, which he and the Robesons
founded.62 A radical opponent of imperialism, Yergan was also a
socialist during the 1930s.63 In 1922, when Baker was still in high
school, he visited the campus and talked about his travels in Africa.64 A
wide-eyed Ella Baker was in the audience. As she was to recall in about
1980: “Max Yergan was the first person that I met who had been to
South Africa… . I was in school and his wife was a teacher there… .
And they went to South Africa under the aegis of the YMCA as
missionaries. And when they got back they told stories of South Africa
that some people are just getting for the first time now.” Baker added that
her own interest in the situation in South Africa was “long since
imbedded in me from that input which was their experience.”65 Her
curiosity about the world was piqued by her relationship with the
Yergans.
In the 1920s Ella Baker herself contemplated a career as a medical
missionary, an ambition influenced both by role models like Max Yergan
and by her mother.66 During her college years, Ella engaged in projects
that closely resembled Anna Ross Baker's missionary activities back
home. In her junior year, for example, Ella worked with the Student
Friendship Fund, which raised money for “students in other lands who
are struggling bravely amid difficult and adverse circumstances to
prepare themselves for future service.”67 This group supported Shaw's
missionary work to establish schools and churches in Africa and
elsewhere. In the winter of 1925, Baker raised $25.50 for the fund, an
impressive sum at the time.68 She also belonged to Shaw's YWCA;
although her Y affiliation never took her as far as Max Yergan's had, she
was selected as a delegate to attend a YWCA meeting held at the
Commodore Hotel in Manhattan.69 That was Baker's first visit to New
York City, and it may have influenced her decision to move there after
graduation.70
When she was still in high school at Shaw Academy, Ella Baker wrote
an eloquent essay praising the role of the church in African American
history. Titled “The Negro Church, the Nucleus of the Negroes' Cultural
Development,” the paper concluded that the church had “cradled the
aesthetic tendencies of the race.”71 Ella paid homage to the preacher's
leadership role within the church, describing him as “the spiritual leader,
the teacher, the lawyer, and general adviser of his congregation.”72 She
observed that many ministers were political as well as spiritual leaders;
like her beloved grandfather, Mitchell Ross, they used the pulpit to
advocate for the race. At the same time, the essay apologized for the
gradualist approach to reform that many church leaders embraced,
explaining that a more radical approach was not realistic: “The group's
economic resources would not be adequate to carry out a radical
program.”73 Therefore, one could not justifiably blame those moderate
leaders who called for patience and slow progress. This is certainly a far
cry from the expectations and criticisms Ella Baker would direct at
apolitical church leaders a generation later.
A POLITE DISSIDENT AND A RELUCTANT
REBEL
During her years at Shaw, Ella Baker always asked questions. As a
senior in high school and as a college student, she challenged the
school's conservative dress code, criticized the paternalistic racism of its
president, and protested its methods of teaching religion and the Bible.
Ella was ambivalent about exactly how confrontational she was willing
to be, especially given the high price she might be required to pay for
dissent. Students who broke the rules and persisted in their defiance of
authority were expelled from school, dimming their prospects and
disappointing their parents. The three known protest activities in which
Ella Baker was involved over the course of her years at Shaw offer a
portrait of her as a tentative young activist, a polite dissident, and a
reluctant rebel.74 As she reflected years later, “I did not break the rules
[at Shaw], but I challenged the rules.”75
Interestingly, the first issue on which Ella Baker took a strong stand
was one in which she personally had very little at stake. When she was a
high school senior, she was asked by a group of older female students to
be their spokesperson in requesting permission to wear silk stockings on
campus. The 1923 bulletin declared that “fancy, colored or silk hose …
will not be allowed. If brought or sent they will be returned.”76 The
specificity of this rule and the explicit statement of the consequences for
breaking it suggest that violations had, in fact, occurred. A group of
female students, most of whom were in college, sought to change this
policy. Although Ella was not very fashion-conscious and did not even
own a pair of silk stockings, she was asked to be the leader and
spokesperson for the group because of her reputation for being assertive
and articulate. According to Baker, the other girls “didn't have guts
enough, or maybe a combination of guts and articulation, to deal with
[their grievance] … and they came to me.”77
Ella Baker wrote a letter on behalf of the students petitioning the
school to relax the dress code, and the group presented its request to the
dean of women students.78 After all, it was the twenties. Magazines were
filled with sketches and photographs of well-dressed ladies wearing silk
stockings, and the young women of Shaw felt they had every right to
dress as stylishly as the next person. The dean was not persuaded. Not
only did the dean reject their petition, but “after this the girls had to go to
chapel every night” as punishment.79 Indeed, the dean became so upset
by this bold and willful affront to the authority of the school
administration that she called Ella Baker into her office to pray that she
would see the error of her ways. Strong-willed Ella, of course, had no
regrets, even though she was threatened with expulsion.80 Baker recalled
that the dean became so distraught over this unapologetic defiance that
she fainted to the floor of her office during one of their conversations. “I
didn't seem particularly penitent, and she [the dean] was very disturbed
about it. But it didn't bother me because I felt I was correct.”81
On one level, it appears as though the protesters simply wanted to be
able to conform to changing standards of fashion by wearing silk hose.
On another level, however, especially for someone like Ella, for whom
the issue was purely a matter of principle rather than a personal
objective, there were larger things at stake. Fashion was an important
cultural arena of struggle for competing gender constructs in the 1920s:
the so-called flappers challenged conventional femininity. Young, single,
urban women, through their dress, dance, and demeanor, contested
prevailing standards of womanhood and morality, projecting an assertive,
self-confident, and consciously sexual public image. Conflicts about how
respectable women of this generation ought to comport themselves were
expressed in the popular media and from the pulpit. While Shaw women
did not aspire to become flappers, they were asserting their right to be
expressive and creative through their dress. And, since wearing silk
stockings likely meant wearing shorter skirts, they were also rejecting
the commonly held assumption that proper ladies had to keep their legs
covered as a sign of respectability. As Baker put it, “I felt it was their
right to wear stockings if they wanted to.”82 Although the dean of
women did not back down in the face of this challenge, the rule against
silk hose was removed from the dress code by the time Ella graduated
four years later.83 In this incident, the nineteen-year-old Ella stood her
ground against authority, but she did not pursue the issue when the group
she represented accepted its defeat.
The next time Ella Baker challenged the school administration, she
did so alone. When the president of the university entertained northern
white guests on campus, it was his custom to invite some students to
perform. “They'd want you to sing spirituals,” Baker remembered.
“Many students resented” this, but went along with it out of either fear or
respect for the school's chief administrator.84 Ella found such practices
demeaning and would not go along. She “had a strong voice,” but she
adamantly refused to participate in what she perceived as an undignified
performance. Such an act of defiance by an undergraduate student, Baker
concluded, must have “irked” the president.85 For the rest of her life, as a
matter of principle, Baker resisted any inclination to ingratiate herself
with people in power.
During her junior year in college, Ella Baker once again confronted
university officials. This time she was part of a large group of protesters
who took a firm stance with a mild tone. On February 1, 1926, Ella
Baker joined with fifty-seven other juniors and seniors in refusing to take
the required Bible examination as it was administered by a particular
faculty member, claiming that the test was being administered unfairly.86
Students objected specifically to the fact that the professor had
demanded they memorize their readings and lectures and had forbade the
use of notebooks during the exam, which was apparently a customary
practice. Students submitted a formal letter of protest to the faculty
council of the university indicating their refusal to sit for the exam and
voicing their complaints about the way the course had been taught. The
tone of the letter was mild, almost obsequious. The students stressed that
they were not trying to be antagonistic, but they claimed disingenuously
that they simply were unable to grasp the subject as it had been
presented.87
After receiving a negative response from the administration, the
majority of the students backed down, acquiesced to the admonitions of
the administration, and took the exam at the designated time under threat
of expulsion. A few stood fast. Ella Baker was not among them. It is
unclear exactly why she made this decision. The fact that she was likely
to be expelled if she persisted in her opposition was probably a
formidable consideration. She may have contacted her parents and been
advised to comply with the school's directive. She may have
reconsidered the situation on her own and decided that, if she were going
to take a stand on principle, this was not the right time or the right issue.
Significantly, Ella Baker had encountered serious difficulties in Bible
class the year before. Her sophomore transcript shows a C— in religion,
the lowest grade of her entire nine years at Shaw and a striking
aberration in her otherwise stellar record.88 Baker's problems with
religion courses at Shaw may have involved simple incompatibility with
particular instructors, but they may well have represented something
more substantive. As the daughter of a devoutly religious woman and the
granddaughter of a minister, Ella had been immersed in biblical
teachings as a child. Neither her near-failing grade in her sophomore
Bible class nor her near-refusal to take the exam in her junior Bible class
reflected ignorance or an inability to comprehend the material. Perhaps
she was beginning to ask questions about religion in a way that was not
encouraged at Shaw. As Effie Yergan recalled, “There wasn't much room
for discussion or debate in Bible class. They taught it like a history
course, that's all.”89 Memorizing names, dates, and sequences of events
was a far cry from contemplating complex theological issues or
considering the contemporary implications of Christianity. Ella had been
inquisitive even as a child, and in college she was an avid debater; she
was not comfortable accepting things at face value. The method of
religious instruction at Shaw apparently did not suit her intellectual or
personal sensibilities.
By the time Ella Baker completed her college education at Shaw, she had
begun to carve out her own path. Most important, she chose not to
pursue education as a professional career. In doing so, she rejected what
was expected of well-educated, middle-class black women and what her
mother had wanted for her. Baker later explained that she resented the
fact that, in her mother's generation and her own, teaching was regarded
as “inevitable”; she had a “rebellious streak,” which led her to resist
conformity.90 Through her years at Shaw, Baker had developed a
political critique of black educational institutions. Since schools were
still largely under white control, teachers had to be conservative and
subdued in order to get and keep their jobs. Women “couldn't teach
unless somebody in the white hierarchy okayed your teaching,” Baker
complained. It was “a demeaning sort of thing, and I resented this, and I
refused to teach.”91 “I had seen generations of graduates also go out and
teach. And sometimes there had been people who had shown spirit
fighting back in school but after they taught they came back and they
were nothing. They had no spirit.”92 So, although Ella had several “good
offers” of teaching jobs, she adamantly refused to accept any of them.93
She was intent on preserving her own fighting spirit; she saw the
socialization that women went through to become teachers and the
resulting subordinate position they came to occupy as a threat to that
spirit.
During her years at Shaw, Ella Baker was a rebel but not yet a radical,
tactically prepared to question but not to defy the rules, and
philosophically ready to argue against the limitations of the dominant
authority but not to challenge its fundamental validity. Ella Baker
retained a basic faith in the major institutions of American society, even
as she recognized the existence of injustice and discrimination. She
clung to the belief that, through her own individual effort, education,
hard work, and faith, she could help to uplift the race and, by extension,
all of humanity. Baker recalled that, at the tender age of twenty-three,
she felt that “the world was out there waiting for you to provide a certain
kind of leadership and give you an opportunity.”94
Graduation day in April 1927 was a shining moment in Ella Baker's
life. As the culmination of her sterling academic career, she was chosen
valedictorian, one of two student speakers at commencement. Her proud
parents sat in the audience, no doubt beaming at what she and they had
accomplished. Ella's graduation address reflected her oratorical skill, her
commitment to social justice, her youthful idealism, and her religiosity.
In her words there is clear evidence that she was the progeny of deeply
religious people and that she shared their faith. There is also a hint of the
determined activist she soon became: “Awake youth of the land and
accept this noble challenge of salvaging the strong ship of civilization,
by the anchors of right, justice and love… . let us resolve that for the
welfare of the whole, for the good of all, for the uplift of the fallen
humanity, for the extension of Christ's kingdom on earth … there shall
be no turning back … we will strike against evil, strife and war until the
echo shall resound in the recesses of the earth and … the waters of the
deep.”95 These words were indeed prophetic, although perhaps not
precisely in the way Ella intended at the time. The optimism she
expressed in 1927 was soon challenged by the onset of the Great
Depression. The harsh realities of poverty and discrimination, coupled
with her exposure to a whole array of left-wing political groups,
radicalized her views and reoriented her thinking. As she moved from a
religious to a more secular stance, the critical questioning and
rebelliousness that marked her youth deepened and broadened. Ella
Baker became a radical intellectual and activist with a vision of a new
social order.
3 HARLEM DURING THE 1930s
THE MAKING OF A BLACK RADICAL ACTIVIST AND
INTELLECTUAL
[Harlem] is the fountainhead of mass movements. From it flows the
progressive vitality of Negro life. Harlem is, as well, a cross-section of
life in Black America—a little from here, there and everywhere. It is at
once the capital of clowns, cults and cabarets, and the cultural and
intellectual hub of the Negro world.
Roi Ottley, 1943
... a hotbed of radical thinking.
Ella Baker, 1977
When Ella Baker arrived in New York City in 1927, she walked up and
down the streets of Harlem in sheer amazement. The intoxicating sounds
of jazz floated in the air, competing with police sirens, domestic
arguments, and soapbox speakers. The congestion, intensity, and
excitement of urban life were all around her. At every turn Baker
realized that she was further from home than she had ever been before:
away from the South, from the sheltered confines of the Shaw campus,
from her protective hometown community, and from the restrictive
authority of her mother.1
Unlike others who had consciously chosen to move to Harlem
because of its reputation as a center of modern African American
cultural life, Ella Baker arrived there somewhat by chance. Her original
plan when she finished college was to attend the University of Chicago,
one of Professor Brawley's alma maters, to pursue graduate studies in
sociology or medicine in preparation for a career as a medical
missionary. She was all “gung ho” for the idea, but her family's finances
were limited, and the Ross-Bakers had no relatives in Chicago to cushion
the transition, either financially or socially. Anna Ross Baker was also
reluctant to let her elder daughter get too far away from her supervision
or at least from the watchful eye of someone she trusted. In New York
there was cousin Martha Grinage, a woman slightly older than Ella,
whom Anna had helped raise in North Carolina. This familial connection
provided assurance that even if Ella did not find a job right away, she
would at least have a roof over her head and food in her stomach, not to
mention a respectable home to shelter her from the vices of the big city.
Ella got a taste of the real world the summer after she left Shaw and
before she landed in New York. That summer she worked at a New
Jersey resort hotel, what she termed a “roadhouse,” that served food and
provided entertainment for guests. She especially enjoyed the
camaraderie of her fellow workers. For her, the job was temporary, but
for some of her co-workers it was the only kind of job they could look
forward to. This introduction to the world of work broadened Ella
Baker's perspective. She recalled that she did not hesitate to stand up for
herself: “If something came up that I didn't like, I'd react to it. I retained
what I called my essential integrity … I neither kowtowed nor felt the
need to lord over anyone else.”2
The hotel employees were from diverse backgrounds. “We were all
mixed up in nationality,” Baker was to recall.3 The mix also included
show business types, aspiring actors, black and white students, and some
Europeans. “That particular summer I met a very interesting group of
young people,” she commented years later.4 This wild and irreverent
crew in no way resembled the model of respectability that her parents
and teachers had tried to cultivate. The owner was a wealthy eccentric
who enjoyed mingling with the guests, whom Baker mockingly called
the local “royalty.” She took a liking to Ella because she was talkative
and friendly. “I had to wait on the table of the owner of the place… . She
wanted me to wait on her table because she had these royalties at the
table and I talked. I'm not the court jester but one of the court's better
spoken servers.”5 This summer job may have represented only a moment
of youthful adventure, but it took Ella Baker far from home and brought
her into contact with a colorful and eclectic group of people. Although
the political culture was very different, it resembled the bohemian
communities she would soon encounter in Greenwich Village and
Harlem.
There was another development in Ella Baker's life at this juncture
that likely did not please her mother. During her last year of college at
Shaw, after an impressive academic career with few distractions other
than an occasional protest, Ella had fallen in love with a smart, gentlespirited, handsome young man named T. J. Roberts (also known as T. J.
Robinson).6 The relationship progressed rapidly, and by the time Baker
was due to leave North Carolina for New York, it was quite serious.7 But
her romantic interest in one man was not enough to lessen the seductive
lure of the big city. By all indications, Roberts himself was looking for a
way to move north, and the two lovers would soon be reunited.
When Ella Baker did finally arrive in New York, she was seduced, not
by Harlem's fiery nightlife, but rather by its vibrant political life. During
the late 1920s and the 1930s, Baker came of age politically and began to
formulate the worldview and theoretical framework that influenced her
organizing work for the next fifty years. In this historic decade, she
evolved from an idealistic and tentative young rebel into a savvy and
determined organizer committed to achieving justice through radical
social change. In Harlem, Baker debated passionately with left-wing men
and embraced a community of dynamic young women whom her friend
Pauli Murray later described as black feminist foremothers.8
Ella Baker was among the tens of thousands of African Americans
who migrated to the North during the 1920s. Hopeful migrants followed
their dreams of a better life to such urban hubs as New York and
Chicago, contributing to one of the most dramatic interregional
migrations in this nation's history. Although few of those who
participated in the Great Migration found the promised land they were
looking for, they dramatically transformed the social landscape they
encountered, forging a new sense of community, creating a dynamic
culture, and developing new strategies for resistance to racial oppression
and economic exploitation.9
What emerged in the African American capital of Harlem during the
decades following World War I was a discourse and practice based on the
politics and vision of fundamental social transformation, that is, a semiautonomous black left. The development of this heterogeneous political
community was fueled by several factors: the rise of a black
intelligentsia consciously critical of conservative accommodationism,
liberal uplift ideology, and narrow black nationalism; the influx of blacks
from the diaspora who helped to internationalize and radicalize the ideas
and politics of U.S.-born blacks; and finally, the increasingly
independent voice of black women activists, artists, and writers.
Ella Baker's new-found community was now a distinctly international
one. Harlem's new residents came not only from the farms and fields of
the U.S. South, but also from Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, Guyana,
Trinidad, and, in smaller numbers, various parts of Africa. By 1930, 55
percent of all foreign-born blacks in the United States lived in Harlem.
Among them were W. A. Domingo, Claudia Jones, Cyril V. Briggs, Otto
Huiswood, Grace Campbell, and Richard Moore, all of whom became
key forces in shaping Harlem's black left community from the 1910s
through the 1930s.10
Baker recalled fondly that Harlem during the years of the Great
Depression was “a hotbed of radical thinking.”11 The political and
cultural rumblings of the late 1910s and early 1920s had infused a new
spirit of resistance and intellectual energy into the community. The
cultural revolution known as the Harlem Renaissance, the black pride
movement led by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, and the agitation
and education carried on by a small group of black socialists known as
the Harlem radicals had effectively re-colored and revitalized Harlem's
political and cultural landscape a decade before Ella Baker's arrival.
These developments, coupled with the economic suffering caused by the
onset of the depression in 1929 and socialist rumblings increasingly
heard around the world, laid the foundation for the “unprecedented
explosion of protest activity” that occurred during the 1930s.12 For Ella
Baker and many others, Harlem was a politically and intellectually
invigorating place to be. Intense political debates raged everywhere,
spawning militant protests in the streets. There were rent strikes, picket
lines, marches, street corner rallies, and the famous Harlem riot of 1935,
which was triggered by an incident of alleged police brutality. Looking
back during the late 1970s on the vibrant and volatile political climate
that she had encountered in Harlem almost fifty years before, Baker
remarked that “I was filling my cup”; “I drank of the ‘nectar divine’.”13
THE EDUCATION OF A RADICAL
INTELLECTUAL
Ella Baker's first task in New York City, after her summer stopover in
New Jersey, was finding a job. Searching for work that paid enough to
enable her to support herself provided her with a radically new kind of
education, even before the depression was in full swing. Baker quickly
realized that, as a black woman, her career options were sorely limited.
Even her coveted college diploma was not much help. On her arrival in
the city, Ella moved in with her cousin Martha and worked at whatever
odd jobs she could find.14 She knocked on the doors of employment
agencies all over town and was unable to find work. She was even turned
down for a job addressing envelopes because there were so many others
competing for the low-paying job.15 Baker's situation was not unusual.
African American women in general were concentrated at the bottom of
the economic hierarchy.16 This discovery came as a shock to the wideeyed young woman. Baker had left North Carolina with great ambitions
and high hopes, believing that great opportunities awaited her.17 The
reality she encountered shattered her naive optimism. She had only seen
glimpses of the world beyond her sheltered childhood community and
the gated campus of Shaw, but in New York City, largely on her own, she
confronted the harshness of the larger society head-on.
One of the first full-time jobs Ella Baker found in the city was
waitressing at New York University's Judson House restaurant in
Greenwich Village. The work was hard and the pay low, but the job
offered other rewards. Since she worked only the busy lunch and dinner
hours, Ella could spend her free time exploring the neighborhood. Like
Harlem, the Village was a vital center of political and cultural activity
during the late 1920s. Left-wing meeting places, coffeehouses, and
bookstores in Greenwich Village provided almost as much stimulation
for Baker as did the black intellectual and arts community uptown.
During her afternoon breaks, she would visit the public library or stroll
through Washington Square Park. She especially enjoyed the spring,
when the park was being groomed for the summer season; the smell of
freshly plowed soil reminded her of the farm community of her youth.18
It was in Greenwich Village that she first heard about the ideas of
socialism and communism.
Still as eager as she had been as a child to engage strangers in
conversation, Ella would meet people on the streets of New York and
begin a discussion. Quite by accident one day, she struck up a
conversation with a young man who, she quickly learned, was a Russian
Jew eager to exchange ideas about the Bolshevik revolution and socialist
movements in general. As she recalled the encounter, “I was just
standing there looking at pigeons or whatever else and this chap starts
talking and he began to try to recruit me into one party or the other.”19
They talked for what seemed like hours. Baker was fascinated. She didn't
join his party because she “didn't have the burning need to just jump into
an organization,” but she became curious about socialism, Marxist
theory, and subjects she “had not heard of before.”20 But the chance
meeting in the park had sparked her interest, and she began to read more
about radical ideas on her own. According to one friend and co-worker
during the 1930s, “Ella Baker was a student of Marx and we used to
debate that often.”21
Baker had an insatiable urge to learn as much as she could about
politics and world affairs, so she took advantage of every opportunity to
attend lectures and engage in discussions about these subjects. Two vital
Harlem institutions became important intellectual training grounds for
Baker and her friends. One was the 135th Street library, later renamed
the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the other was
the Harlem Branch YWCA (close in proximity and function to the YMCA).
Both institutions were teeming with political activity, hosting regular
forums on issues ranging from socialism to segregation. They became
key gathering places for many young Harlem artists, intellectuals, and
activists. On his arrival in New York in 1921, the poet Langston Hughes
recounted: “I came up out of the subway at 135th and Lenox into the
beginnings of the Negro Renaissance. I headed for the Harlem YMCA
down the block, where so many new, young dark … arrivals in Harlem
have spent their early days. The next place I headed to that afternoon was
the Harlem Branch Library just up the street.”22 These two institutions
were the dual pillars of Harlem's intellectual and political life for over
two decades.
Her intellectual curiosity and growing passion for politics led Baker
to spend more and more time at the Harlem library, where she met and
befriended white librarian Ernestine Rose, twenty years her senior.
Beginning in 1925, Rose oversaw the founding and expansion of the
Negro Division within the library and mentored a young interracial staff
to maintain the collection.23 At the library, Baker helped establish the
first Negro History Club, which met regularly to discuss historical and
contemporary events relevant to blacks. The group routinely sponsored
forums and other educational events for the Harlem community.
Sometimes heated discussions would spill over into the street; interested
discussants would gather around an able orator perched atop a crate, or
standing on a stepladder, as she or he preached about colonialism, the
class struggle, or American racism. The library occasionally even paid
some soapbox speakers for their oratory, a political tradition that was
imported to Harlem by Caribbean immigrants.24 Baker recalled, “If you
hadn't stood on the corner of 135th and & 7th Avenue [protesting and
debating] … you weren't with it.”25 There is no evidence that Baker
herself ever climbed on one of these makeshift stages to display her
oratorical abilities, but in May 1936 she helped organize a street-corner
discussion on lynching sponsored by the library.26
Baker joined the library's Adult Education Committee around 1933.
The Harlem Adult Education Experiment, as it was called, sponsored
forums, lectures, and debates on a wide range of topics.27 According to
Elinor Des Verney Sinette, who wrote a history of the Harlem library, it
was “especially innovative in the character and breadth of its activities.
In addition to the traditional library services, the Harlem Experiment
used the library and its resources to offer courses in the graphic and
performing arts, to sponsor lectures and book discussions for local
residents and to make its facilities available for community forums.”28
Baker's involvement in the Adult Education Experiment was evidence of
her profound interest in African American social and political history
and of her commitment to spreading that knowledge to as wide an
audience as possible. Up to this point in her life, knowledge had been a
source of personal empowerment; now, as she became more political, she
came to see education and knowledge as tools in the struggle against
oppression. From her perspective, reading, discussions, forums, and
lectures were as important to a movement for social change as mass
protests, boycotts, and strikes.
Baker became an employee of the Harlem branch library in January
1934, when she was hired to coordinate an educational and
consciousness-raising program for Harlem youth and young adults, aged
sixteen to twenty-six. She “organized and developed the Young People's
Forum (YPF) in 1936 and later worked with the adult Education
Committee on its summer programs for mothers in Colonial and St.
Nicholas Avenue Parks.”29 According to Baker's supervisor, she
“successfully formed an active organization, which she brought in touch
with other youth groups in the neighborhood and city.”30 As early as the
1930s, Baker served as a catalyst linking together different sectors of the
black community, breaking down generational barriers and facilitating
exchanges of skills and resources. In the YPF, she introduced Harlem
teenagers to an impressive roster of prominent speakers, emphasizing the
need for active participation by the youth themselves. As Baker exposed
many young people to the world of books and ideas, she sought to instill
in them a sense of their own power to think critically, analyze events,
and articulate their opinions and beliefs. The YPF included discussions
about “social, economic, and cultural topics,” as well as librarysponsored debates on various controversial issues of the day.31 In her
work with the YPF and in many other contexts, Ella Baker was a teacher
without a traditional classroom. The belief that education and the
exchange and dissemination of ideas could make a difference in people's
lives was to remain central to her life's work.
The 137th Street YWCA was another important gathering place,
attracting many strong-minded, young, single women who were seeking
the excitement, intellectual freedom, and the cultural stimulation that
only Harlem could provide. Pauli Murray, who later became a prominent
civil rights lawyer, religious leader, and feminist poet, rented a room at
the Y in 1929. Murray described the Harlem YWCA as a focus of political
and social activity, and a “heady” place to be at that time. On its staff
were such bright and determined black women as Dorothy Height, later
the head of the National Council of Negro Women, Anna Arnold
Hedgeman, the YWCA's membership secretary, Viola Lewis Waiters, and
Margaret Douglass; all went on to illustrious careers as professionals,
public figures, and political activists.32 According to Murray, “None of
these women would have called themselves feminists in the 1930's, but
they were strong independent personalities who, because of their
concerted efforts to rise above the limitations of race and sex, and to help
younger women do the same, shared a sisterhood that foreshadowed the
revival of the feminist movement in the 1960s.”33 Baker spent many
hours in the Y cafeteria and meeting rooms. In this thriving community
of black women, she found the inspiration and intellectual challenges
that aided her in defining her own personal and political identity.
Pauli Murray, Ella Baker, and the friends who congregated at the
YWCA represented a new model of black womanhood in this era.
Untrammeled by attachments to either birth families or husbands, these
women were adventuresome, educated, and ambitious. The social
climate of the times and the abysmal conditions of suffering created by
the depression helped to channel much of their energy and ambition into
radical political activity. Some of them worked with the Communist and
Socialist Parties but many more of them were “fellow travelers” in a
loosely connected circle of oppositional forces. If there was a rally about
the Scottsboro case to defend young black men against trumped-up
charges of raping two white women on a train, they called up one
another and went as a group. If there was a picket line organized by the
“Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” campaign, which used consumer
boycotts to persuade stores with black customers to hire black
employees, leaflets would be dropped off at the Y for distribution. This
was a loose, informal network of women activists, many of whom did
not join or pledge allegiance to any of the organized left factions but
were actively engaged with a wide range of issues.34
Women were integral to Harlem's political life, both as individuals
and in organized groups. Some organizations, such as the Harlem
Housewives League and the Domestic Workers Union, represented
collective action around the common interests of women. In her study of
African American women's political activism, the historian Deborah
Gray White argues convincingly that “seldom did African American
women organize across class lines.”35 In the unique political
environment of depression-era Harlem, however, such cross-class unity
was indeed attempted and occasionally achieved. Maids, cooks, and
unemployed workers bonded with leftist, middle-class teachers in adult
education classes. Ordinary Harlem residents worked with journalists
and other professionals in the cooperative movement. And the library,
the YMCA and YWCA, and the street corners were democratic public
spaces where community members, either formally educated or selftaught, gathered, debated, and collaborated. In all these venues, women
were central participants.
Pauli Murray stood out among this group of smart and spirited young
women. She was articulate, well read, witty, and fiercely interested in
politics and social justice. She and Ella Baker became fast friends. Their
lives had interesting parallels. Both women grew up in North Carolina;
both migrated to Harlem around the same time; and both obtained jobs in
the Workers Education Project of the Works Progress Administration.
Both were involved in the Jay Lovestone political faction during the
1930s and affiliated with the (Lovestone-influenced) Liberal Party
during the 1940s and 1950s. Years later, when Baker was working for the
NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Murray lent
support and sang the praises of her old friend.36 After she left Harlem,
Murray attended Howard University Law School, taught law at Yale and
Brandeis, eventually entered the ministry, and wrote four books. The two
women remained in touch off and on for over forty years.
Baker's political awakening was stimulated by the lively social and
intellectual community she encountered in Harlem, and her close
comradeship with other women activists such as Murray nurtured her
political maturation. Her development as a radical intellectual took place
through a systematic educational process that went on both inside and
outside cultural institutions. Baker later described herself as one of the
“ignorant ones” when she first arrived in Harlem with her college degree
in hand.37 In retrospect, she felt that she had gained a clearer
understanding of the world around her and of how to go about changing
it through her political education by activists, many of whom had less
formal education than she. In lauding Baker's credentials in a 1932
article in the NAACP's magazine, the Crisis, her mentor, George Schuyler,
underscored the learning process that occurred through Baker's
participation in the low-wage work force. “By force of circumstances,”
he observed, “her ‘post graduate’ work has included domestic service,
factory work and other freelance labors, to which ‘courses’ she credits
her education.”38 Baker learned many valuable lessons about history,
politics, and people through her experiences as a political organizer,
journalist, worker, and teacher, as well as through her discussions and
interactions with other activists in a wide array of settings.
The streets of Harlem provided a cultural and political immersion like no
other. At no other time in twentieth-century African American history
was there a more vibrant black public sphere than in Harlem in the 1920s
and '30s, infused as it was with the exciting intellectual rhythms of the
black diaspora. The serious exchange of ideas, cultural performances,
and political debates flowed out of classrooms, private homes, meeting
halls and bars onto the neighborhood thoroughfare of Lenox Avenue.
As historian Irma Watkins-Owens writes: “From World War I through
the 1930's, the unclaimed terrain of the Harlem streetcorner became the
testing ground for a range of political ideologies and a forum for
intellectual inquiry and debate.” These self-styled orators are sometimes
described as “soapboxers,” but because of their choice of political
platform Watkins-Owens calls them “stepladder speakers.”39 Among
them were well-known Harlem radicals like Baker's friend Frank
Crosswaith of the Harlem Labor Center and Hubert Harrison, a socialist
and onetime Marcus Garvey supporter. Women participating on the
stepladder circuit included Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, Grace
Campbell, Williana J. Burrroughs, and Elizabeth Frederickson. The
struggle to determine Harlem's public culture was as much a class and
ethnic struggle as a struggle over which speakers and ideas would
predominate. Respectable Harlemites saw the sometimes raucous crowds
that gathered as a source of embarrassment; preachers looked down on
the crude language that was sometimes expressed; and police actually
arrested several speakers for disturbing the peace. Still, the tradition
continued.40 Streetcorner discussions were an informal site of Ella
Baker's political education in the 1930s, but there were more formal
courses of study as well.
In 1931, Baker spent a semester at the Brookwood Labor College in
Katonah, New York. There she had an opportunity to learn about theories
and models of social change, as well as the history of working people.
Brookwood, where Pauli Murray had also spent time, was established in
1921 by a group of socialists and pacifists in order to offer union
organizers and other progressives a socially relevant curriculum.41 It was
one of a number of worker education schools set up around that time to
train labor organizers. The teachers at Brookwood went far beyond their
stated mission. They were radical, not only in what they taught but also
in how they taught, experimenting with new teaching methods and
encouraging students to think and speak for themselves. In her book on
the Brookwood educators and their cohorts, the historian Susan Kates
describes how these teachers sought “to enact forms of writing and
speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the
very essence of their pedagogies.”42 This was Baker's first encounter
with an open, democratic approach to formal education. She saw
enormous transformative potential in democratic and nontraditional
learning environments like Brookwood. She took ideas, theoretical
paradigms, and philosophies seriously, and she spent much of her adult
life mastering ways of how to pass that knowledge on to others and
empower them in the process.
Ella Baker's political work from the late 1930s onward was consistent
with a worldview that she constructed from the wide range of ideologies
and traditions she had engaged with over the years. She combined the
black Baptist missionary values of charity, humility, and service with the
economic theories of Marxists and socialists of various stripes who
advocated a redistribution of society's wealth and a transfer of power
from capitalist elites to the poor and working classes. Added to the mix
was Baker's popular democratic pedagogy, which emphasized the
importance of tapping oppressed communities for knowledge, strength,
and leadership in constructing models for social change.
In many respects, Baker herself was what Gramscian theorists refer to
as an “organic intellectual.” Her primary base of knowledge came from
grassroots communities and from lived experience, not from formal
study. She was a partisan intellectual, never feigning a bloodless
objectivity, but always insisting that ideas should be employed in the
service of oppressed people and toward the goal of social justice. In the
1930s, New York was her classroom, and Baker was both student and
teacher.
In his biographical study of Ivory Perry, a St. Louis activist, George
Lipsitz offers a useful definition of an organic intellectual in practice:
Traditional intellectuals can distinguish themselves purely through
the originality of their ideas or the eloquence of their expression, but
organic intellectuals must initiate a process that involves people in
social contestation… . Organic intellectuals try to understand and
change society at the same time… . Organic intellectuals generate and
circulate oppositional ideas through social action. They create symbols
and slogans that expose the commonalities among seemingly atomized
experiences, and they establish principles that unite disparate groups
into effective coalitions. Most significantly, they challenge dominant
interests through education and agitation that expose the gap between
the surface harmonies that seem to unite society and the real conflicts
and antagonisms that divide it.43
This description characterizes much of the public intellectual work that
Ella Baker did, beginning with the Harlem Adult Education Experiment
and the Young People's Forum and continuing with the Young Negroes'
Cooperative League and with the Workers Education Project later in the
decade. By the time she was thirty, she had become a radical intellectual
committed to teaching and learning from the people in movements for
social change, an approach that would continue to distinguish her
political work.
THE YOUNG NEGROES' COOPERATIVE
LEAGUE AND THE DREAM OF A NEW
SOCIAL ORDER
In the early 1930s, grim economic realities, the looming threat of a
second world war, and the rise of European fascism had a strong,
sobering effect on the young activists and intellectuals Ella Baker
associated with. Their debates about politics, economics, and social
change took on timely relevance and had concrete implications for the
lives of the masses of black Harlemites. The historic backdrop of the
depression era imbued their exchanges with a new sense of urgency.
The Great Depression hit Harlem hard. Forced evictions of entire
families in the dead of winter were common sights, as were the hungry
faces of poverty-stricken children and long lines of desperate jobseekers. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who was on the staff of the Harlem
YWCA that Baker frequented, recalled:
With the financial collapse in 1929, a large mass of Negroes was
faced with the reality of starvation and they turned sadly to public
relief. A few chanted optimistically, “Jesus will lead me, and Welfare
will feed me,” but … meanwhile men, women and children searched
in garbage cans for food, foraging with dogs and cats. Many families
had been reduced to living below street level … in cellars and
basements that had been converted into makeshift flats. Packed in
damp, rat-ridden dungeons, they existed in squalor not too different
from that of the Arkansas sharecroppers.44
Seeing black people living in southern-style poverty in the North's
most modern city shook many Harlemites' assumptions about which
pathways would lead to progress for the race. These scenes of suffering
had a tremendous impact on Baker's evolving political consciousness.
Baker's political journalism reveals her responses to the depression.
An article she coauthored in 1935 with African American communist
Marvel Cooke, vividly describes the abysmal plight of black New
Yorkers. Titled “The Bronx Slave Market,” the article highlights the
connections among wage labor, slavery, race, and sex. Baker
documented the humiliating experiences of black domestic workers who
huddled together on designated street corners in the early morning hours,
waiting for white middle-class women to look them over and choose a
lucky one to hire for the day. Baker, who, according to a friend, had
worked briefly as a maid herself, posed as a job seeker in order to get an
insider's view of what these women were going through. The humiliation
that such self-exposure entailed was compounded, so Baker found, by
the desperate act that some women were driven to: that of selling their
bodies to the highest bidder:
The Simpson Avenue block exudes the stench of the slave market
at its worst. Not only is human labor bartered and sold for slave wage,
but human love also is a marketable commodity… . Rain or shine,
cold or hot, you will find them there—Negro women, old and young,
sometimes bedraggled, sometimes neatly dressed—but with the
invariable paper bundle, waiting expectantly for Bronx housewives to
buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or even for a
day… . If not the wives themselves, maybe their husbands, their sons,
their brothers, under the subterfuge of work, offer worldly-wise girls
higher bids for their time.45
Baker and Cooke's vivid account of these scenes illustrates how deeply
both women were affected by the depression and its dehumanizing
impact on poor black women.46
“The Bronx Slave Market” reflects Ella Baker's lucid assessment of
the complex realities of race, gender, and class in the lives of African
American women. The women Baker observed on Simpson Avenue were
victimized by their position as blacks, as workers, and as women.
Baker's description meshes these analytical abstractions together in the
intricate web of lived human experience. Although poor black women
were sexually exploited as women, there was no magical, raceless and
classless sisterhood between them and the white female employers, who
were just as eager to use them for their muscle as their husbands were to
use them for their sexual services. The economic rigors of the depression
had intensified all forms of oppression, pushing many black women from
the lower rungs of the wage labor force back to day work and even into
occasional prostitution. When Baker and Cooke wrote their article, the
modern concept of feminism was still a foreign notion to most
Americans, black and white. Yet the black feminist notion of intersecting
systems of oppression as a cornerstone of black women's collective
experience was an observable reality, and in their article Cooke and
Baker came close to articulating it as a theory.47
Ella Baker and Marvel Jackson Cooke traveled in overlapping
political and social circles. They knew one another by reputation and
through mutual friends but had not formally met until they were asked by
an editor at the Crisis to coauthor an article on the plight of poor black
women in the Bronx. Over the course of several weeks, as the two
women researched, discussed, and wrote their story, they got to know
one another and gradually became friends. After the publication of “The
Bronx Slave Market,” Baker and Cooke were on a few panels together
and saw one another from time to time at social and political events in
Harlem.48 They developed a mutual respect and admiration for one
another that, according to Cooke's recollections decades later, continued
despite their political differences. Ella Baker spoke quite fondly of
Marvel in an interview as late as the 1970s.49
Marvel Jackson Cooke, the daughter of black Debsian socialists from
Minnesota, came to New York in 1927, the same year that Baker did, and
quickly landed a job as W. E. B. Du Bois's secretary and assistant. Her
mother had known Du Bois previously and thus helped her to secure the
job. Du Bois introduced Marvel Jackson (later Marvel Cooke) to a whole
array of political ideas, and according to his biographer, David Lewis,
also may have made unwanted sexual advances toward the naive young
woman.50 She made other political and personal connections on her own,
and she eventually chose to join the underground section of the
Communist Party (CP). She became a “mainstay” of the “popular front”
publication the People's Voice and grew to be very close to Paul and
Essie Robeson and other well-known CP members and sympathizers who
congregated in Harlem. Cooke lived in the popular 321 Edgecomb
Avenue apartment building that was at one time or another the home of
George and Josephine Schuyler, the journalist Ted Poston, and NAACP
executives Walter White and Roy Wilkins.51 Her sister's marriage to
Wilkins could have connected Cooke to a wider network of people, but
she and her brother-in-law were at odds politically; so the relationship
was never close. Cooke's clandestine party membership circumscribed
her involvement in other political activities, a fact that she regretted
many decades later.52 Her closest friends were, for the most part, her
party comrades.
The differences as well as the connections between Baker and Cooke
are revealing. The two women were close in age, lived nearby, and
shared a left-leaning political orientation and passion for ideas. Yet their
social and political lives were not analogous. While Cooke associated
primarily with other members of the Communist Party, Ella Baker's
circle was much broader and more eclectic. She maintained close
relationships with some CP members, and she worked with many others
on particular campaigns. Baker did not confine her associations to people
of a single ideological stripe or political party. In the early 1930s, she
admittedly had more questions than answers. She sought out people with
whom she could study social conditions and political strategy and places
where wide-ranging discussion and debate flourished. This curiosity
inescapably brought Baker into contact with not only communists and
socialists but also the followers of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, who were a
visible and vocal force on the Harlem political scene, despite Garvey's
deportation the year Ella Baker arrived there. A Jamaican immigrant and
admirer of Booker T. Washington, Garvey arrived in Harlem in 1916 and
began recruiting members to his Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA). His message of African pride and economic selfsufficiency for blacks, coupled with his flamboyant pageantry, won him
thousands of followers and the ire of both the federal government and
black political leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw his politics as
escapist and self-promoting. Ella Baker's close friend William Pickens,
an NAACP official, was one of Garvey's most ardent critics. But UNIA's
popularity piqued Ella Baker's interest: she regularly read the
organization's paper, the Negro World, and, according to Conrad Lynn,
even attended public forums organized by the group.53 Baker spent much
of her early years in Harlem in public venues soaking up the culture, the
politics, and the intellectual fervor. She even enjoyed dining at the
restaurant run by Father Divine's organization on occasion, because it
was another lively site for political and intellectual engagement with
ordinary Harlem residents.54
For most of the 1930s, however, Ella Baker's closest political ally was
the iconoclastic writer and activist George Schuyler, a socialist,
philosophical anarchist, and critic of Soviet-style communism. He
became a mentor to Baker, and through him and his wife, Josephine, a
young, white artist from Texas, Baker was absorbed into a lively
community of writers, artists, and radical intellectuals from across the
nation and around the world who were living in Harlem at the time.
Baker and Schuyler were introduced to each other by a mutual friend, L.
M. Cole, a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American, and the two hit it
off right away. Schuyler was a smart, creative, provocative, and critical
thinker who, according to Baker, impressed her because he “would raise
questions that weren't being raised.”55
Baker soon became a regular member of the circle that gathered at the
Schuylers' home, which was large, lively, and exceptionally open, as
Marvel Cooke recalled. People would bring friends or acquaintances
without a specific invitation from the hosts.56 In this setting, Baker found
others who were grappling with the same moral, philosophical, and
political dilemmas that she was wrestling with at the time. She enjoyed
their company, but, she later recalled, she “didn't care as much about the
socializing as the exchange of ideas, or at least being exposed to the
debate.”57 The Schuylers' apartment, like the YWCA cafeteria, the forums
at the library, and the public parks and street corners of Harlem, was a
site for an animated discourse that helped define African American
public life. In these venues, politics and culture were debated and areas
of consensus were formed and reformed.58 The activists, writers and
artists who convened regularly at the Schuylers' apartment had a certain
romantic appeal about them. They were young, creative, bold, witty, and
cosmopolitan. Some were known to be pretty “snappy dressers,” too.59
Their spirited conversations often lasted until dawn, and participants left
intellectually energized and physically exhausted. Ella Baker took part in
many of these late-night parlays, enjoying the stimulating company,
provocative conversations, and elegant hospitality. The Schuylers resided
at one of Harlem's more prestigious addresses, in the “Park Lincoln
Apartments on Edgecomb Avenue on what Harlemites called the upscale
area of ‘Sugar Hill.’” A reporter described the building as one “where a
rich canopy runs out to the sidewalk, and where a liveried footman in
gold braid must announce a visitor before he is permitted to go up in the
automatic elevator.”60 In other words, the group's criticisms of capitalist
decadence were made in very comfortable surroundings.
Despite this obvious material contradiction, most members of
Schuyler's circle were not simply armchair radicals; they were organizers
as well. Schuyler was as much of a doer as he was a talker and a writer.
By all indications, he was genuinely committed to improving the
conditions of the poor, even though he had managed to secure a fairly
cushy lifestyle for himself.
A belligerent and colorful character in Harlem politics during the
1920s and 1930s, Schuyler became even more controversial thereafter.61
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1895, he served in the army during
World War I and then settled in New York City. In 1923 he joined the
staff of the Harlem-based socialist magazine the Messenger, working
alongside Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph; the latter became one
of the country's best-known labor leaders as head of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters and then as a founder of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations.62 Schuyler became contributing editor of the magazine
after Owen's departure in the winter of 1923. As a protégé of Randolph,
Schuyler was pulled into a circle of black radical intellectuals that
included Frank Crosswaith, a black labor leader; Robert Bagnall, an
NAACP official; and J. A. Rogers, a journalist and self-taught historian.
These Harlem leftists were united by their opposition to the separatist
nationalism of Marcus Garvey. Under the banner of the short-lived
organization the Friends of Negro Freedom, the group met weekly at
Randolph's apartment to discuss contemporary politics, history, and
philosophy. Those Sunday gatherings made quite a strong impression on
Schuyler, who recalled that nothing “escaped the group's probing minds
and witty shafts.”63 By the late 1920s, the Messenger had ceased to exist,
the group had disintegrated, and Schuyler had begun writing a popular
column, “Views and Reviews,” for the nationally circulated African
American newsweekly the Pittsburgh Courier. The column surveyed
domestic politics and race issues and occasionally commented on foreign
affairs.
Ella Baker and George Schuyler became very close friends despite
their very distinct personalities. Schuyler was an arrogant, irreverent, and
sometimes ostentatious young writer, who took particular pleasure in
intellectual sparring matches with worthy opponents. He was a close
friend and admirer of the iconoclastic, white editor of the American
Mercury, H. L. Mencken; in fact, he was sometimes referred to as the
black Mencken.64 Schuyler took great delight in ridiculing groups and
individuals that he deemed corrupt, backward, or inept. His targets
covered the gamut from black ministers and petit bourgeois black
entrepreneurs to Communist organizers. According to his longtime
colleague A. Philip Randolph, Schuyler took few things seriously.65 In
contrast, Baker was pensive and unassuming. Despite her wit and goodnatured humor, she took everything seriously, and, as one friend recalls,
she always “seemed mature beyond her years.”66
By the early 1930s, Ella Baker was no longer a devoutly religious
person, but she still appreciated the cohesive role of the church as a
spiritual and material resource for black people.67 In contrast, Schuyler
was an avowed and outspoken atheist who saw Christianity and religion
as stumbling blocks to black progress. At times, his criticisms of the
black church were so ruthless and relentless that anyone who was
uncritical of organized religion on some level would have been unable to
work closely with him. Presumably, Baker had developed her own
doubts and criticisms of the church as an institution by this time.68 Her
doubts later evolved into a more developed critique of the mainstream
black church in general and of the black clergy in particular. Yet, despite
or perhaps because of their contrasting characteristics, Schuyler and
Baker were the best of friends and the closest of comrades for several
years. They complemented each other in their joint political endeavors,
with Baker guaranteeing that business matters were taken care of and
Schuyler serving as a figurehead and spokesperson for the cause. In her
relationship with Schuyler, Baker took on a role she continued to play for
much of her political life, that of a behind-the-scenes organizer who paid
attention to the mechanics of movement building in a way that few highprofile charismatic leaders did, or even knew how to do.
Ella Baker was frequently a resource for the Schuylers in personal as
well as political matters. When the Schuylers' daughter, Phillipa, was
born in 1932, George was, as usual, away on business, and he asked Ella
to assist his wife. Ella stayed with Josephine for a few days after the
baby was born, keeping her company and helping her with chores around
the apartment.69 Ella and Josephine became very good friends. Baker
recalled that the wives of many of Schuyler's black colleagues
disapproved of his interracial marriage, which was quite uncommon in
those days, and did not welcome Josephine into their social circle.70 For
Baker, that was simply not an issue.
But there were other issues in the Schuylers' marriage that caused her
some difficulty.71 Much later, Baker hinted that George may have had
extramarital affairs and further intimated that she had kept George's
philandering a secret from his wife. Her disapproval and silence reflected
Ella Baker's complicated and often conflicted relationship with black
men in leadership positions. She was close enough to their day-to-day
lives to witness the backstage drama, the character flaws, the sexism, and
the contradictions between their high ideals and their imperfect, even
duplicitous actions. Although she was often critical, her criticism may
have been muted by the political goals she shared with her colleagues.
Baker acquiesced to the permeable and artificial divide between the
personal and the political only with regard to sexual matters.72 She was
aware that Schuyler, and later some of her colleagues in the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, were cheating on their wives and
professing moral rectitude according to conventional standards, but she
did not expose their behavior or frame it in political terms, even though
she clearly viewed it as an expression of male sexual privilege, an option
not socially acceptable for their wives or, for that matter, for Baker
herself. Despite George Schuyler's male chauvinism and adulterous
behavior behind closed doors, Ella Baker was still willing to work with
him politically.73 Many years later, she revealed his secrets, but even
then she was not explicit: “Of course George was male and had
opportunities to exercise his maleness by traveling. I wouldn't claim that
George was a saint and all.”74 Still, she accepted him as a flawed person,
yet a reliable colleague.
The idea of forming black consumer cooperatives as a strategy to
combat the economic devastation being wreaked by the depression and
to educate black people about socialism galvanized the group of
intellectuals and activists that gathered around Schuyler. He proposed the
idea in his column in the Pittsburgh Courier and received a positive
response from readers. In the spring of 1930, Schuyler issued a call to
young blacks interested in the “economic salvation” of the race through
cooperative economics to come forth and establish a new organization
for the purpose of studying the idea and “carrying the message to all
corners of Negro America.”75 He emphasized that the young recruits had
to be “militants, pioneers, unswerved by the defeatist propaganda of the
oldsters, and the religious hokum of our generally … parasitic clergy.”76
By November, he had only received a handful of responses. Undeterred,
Schuyler joined forces with Ella Baker and called a meeting of those
who were interested in the idea. The Young Negroes' Cooperative
League (YNCL) was formed in 1930. In October 1931, the group held its
first annual conference at the YMCA in Pittsburgh, with Robert Vann,
publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, delivering the introductory remarks.
The event was attended by thirty delegates “who paid their own carfare
to come” from as far away as Washington D.C. and South Carolina.77
Despite the small number of official delegates, the conference's opening
session drew a capacity crowd of over 600 people. Baker shared the
speaker's platform with Schuyler and Vann, addressing the important role
of black women in the emerging cooperative movement. Schuyler
became the first president of the YNCL, and Baker was unanimously
elected to serve as its national director.78
The YNCL was a coalition of local cooperatives and buying clubs
loosely affiliated in a network of nearly two dozen affiliate councils
scattered throughout the United States. Each council functioned
independently but contributed funds for the national office, which was
based in New York City. The YNCL circulated a newsletter, served as a
clearinghouse for information, attempted to bolster the cooperative
concept through national publicity efforts, and offered workshops and
training sessions for co-op leaders. In her capacity as executive director
of the organization, Baker staffed the national office and traveled around
the country consulting with local council leaders and promoting the
value of cooperative ventures, for which she received a salary of $10 a
week.79 As the masthead of the group's stationery proclaimed, its
principal purpose was to “gain economic power through consumer
cooperation.”80 Baker emphasized her own commitment to that mission
in 1932, when she stated: “We accept with zest the opportunity which is
now ours to prove to ourselves and others that the Negro can and will
save himself from economic death.”81
The founding statement of the YNCL reflected many of the principles
of grassroots democracy and group-centered leadership that Ella Baker
advocated for the rest of her political life. The coalition pledged itself to
the full inclusion and equal participation of women. An explicit
emphasis on gender equality was unusual for any political organization,
black or white, during this period; this commitment suggests that Baker's
remarks about the vital role women could play in the cooperative
movement were well received, and it certainly underscores the group's
inclusive and egalitarian orientation. The YNCL took steps to ensure the
full participation of its rank and file in decision making and leadership.
Since membership in individual co-ops had to be purchased through the
buying of shares, larger shareholders could conceivably have wielded
greater influence in determining the priorities of the co-ops than smaller
shareholders. To avoid such inequalities, the YNCL adopted the position
that each member was allotted only one vote, regardless of the number of
cooperative shares he or she owned. In a pamphlet titled “An Appeal to
Young Negroes,” George Schuyler declared the organization's
commitment to grassroots democracy: “We are ultra democratic and all
power rests in the hands of the rank and file. All officers serve only
during the pleasure of the electorate.”82 This emphasis on participatory
democracy is all the more significant in a political climate where the
major organizations trying to organize among blacks— the NAACP, the
CP, and the UNIA—were under fire for elitist, authoritarian, or messianic
leadership styles.
Another founding principle of the YNCL was that young people should
be in the forefront of the struggle for social change. If the energy,
optimism, and rebelliousness of youth could be harnessed and directed
into constructive political channels, the black movement would be
revitalized. The YNCL restricted its membership to young adults thirtyfive years old and younger. Older adults could be admitted only after a
two-thirds vote of approval by the local membership. The group's
founder, George Schuyler, was already thirty-five years old when the
organization was established; Ella Baker was twenty-seven. Schuyler
commented at the time, “This measure is designed to keep the control of
the organization in the hands of young people. We consider most of the
oldsters hopelessly bourgeois and intent on emulating Rockefeller and
Ford on a shoestring budget.”83 To ensure that its autonomy would
remain uncompromised, the YNCL refused to accept financial support
from churches or charitable foundations.84
While Ella Baker and the other leaders of the YNCL held no great
reverence for older, established leaders, they did not assume that the
mantle of leadership should pass to them automatically because of their
youth. In the tradition of the young intellectuals known as the Harlem
radicals in the 1920s, a group to which Schuyler had belonged, the YNCL
placed great emphasis on internal discussion and education among its
members. The founding statement declared that “each council should
follow a well-planned educational program, emphasizing at all times the
inclusiveness and far-reaching effects of Consumers Co-Operation on the
Negro's social and economic status.”85 Rank-and-file members were
offered an analysis of the cooperative movement as it related to larger
national and international issues as part of their orientation to the
cooperative movement. The organization's founders insisted “we must be
trained before trying to lead people” and that therefore in the first year
“each council [will be] engaged in extensive educational work.”86 The
key role of mass education in grassroots organizing was another
principle Baker pushed for time and again in the decades that followed.
In 1930, the YNCL envisioned an ambitious five-year plan, which,
according to Schuyler, was inspired by the Bolsheviks' five-year
economic plan. It included the goals of training 5,000 co-op leaders by
1932, establishing a cooperative wholesale outlet by 1933, and financing
an independent college by 1937. Although most of these heady plans
were never realized, the YNCL's membership did grow steadily in its first
few years. Starting with a core group of thirty in December 1930, the
organization boasted a membership of 400 two years later, with local
councils in some twenty-two cities from California to New York.87 Two
of the more successful ventures were a grocery store employing four
full-time workers and “doing a business of $850 a week” in Buffalo,
New York, and “a co-operative newsstand and stationery store” in
Philadelphia.88
The organization faced financial difficulties from the outset. In
January 1932, Ella Baker, as executive director of the organization,
oversaw the kick-off of a three-month “Penny a Day” campaign urging
YNCL supporters to set aside a penny each day to invest in cooperative
projects in the hope of revitalizing the cooperative movement and saving
the fledgling national office of the YNCL. The campaign was timed to
coincide with three dates of historic significance: Abraham Lincoln's
birthday, Negro History Week, and the signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation. The second annual conference was held in Washington,
D.C., in April 1932. By September of that year, however, the national
office was forced to close because of the lack of financial support from
local councils. Without any guarantee of steady income, Baker continued
to serve as unpaid executive director of the YNCL, answering
correspondence, accepting speaking engagements, and coordinating
weekly meetings of the New York council, which were held at the offices
of the Urban League.89 At the height of the organization's financial
crisis, Baker urged her comrades to remain optimistic: “remember, every
movement has started as our movement has started.”90
Ella Baker's determination in the face of such formidable obstacles
was due, in large part, to her having begun to develop a long-range view
of political struggle. The founders of the YNCL had a vision of social
change and racial uplift that extended well beyond the immediate
benefits resulting from the establishment of buying clubs and
cooperative enterprises. They viewed the cooperative movement as much
more than a survival strategy to ameliorate the suffering of a handful of
black participants; it was a vital, practical proving ground for the
socialist principles of communalism and mutual aid. To them, the
concepts of cooperation and collective action were the ideological pillars
on which this larger movement was to be built. The cooperative
movement was thus a microcosm of a new social order and embodied the
idealistic vision held by many of its proponents.
Cooperatives offered an alternative to the cut-throat, unbridled
competition that many felt had led to the 1929 stock market crash and
the ensuing depression. In describing the mission of the cooperative
movement, Baker declared: “Ours is an unprecedented battle front. We
are called upon to … be in the vanguard of the great world movement
toward a new order.”91 An article distributed by the YNCL explains the
mission of the more radical wing of the 1930s cooperative movement as
follows: “The consumer coop is an evolutionary movement, whereby the
people … hope to obtain full control of the supply and distribution of the
necessities of life, thereby eliminating the profit motive from trade… .
Consumer cooperation is revolutionary, for its ultimate aim is to create a
better social structure by making unnecessary the present form of
government which is operated by and for the privileged class.”92
Baker and her idealistic young comrades saw the building of
cooperative economic institutions as the first step toward a peaceful
transformation of society from capitalism to a more egalitarian, socialist
alternative. Buying cooperatives would, they hoped, demonstrate on a
small scale the efficiency of collective economic planning and
simultaneously promote the values of interdependency, group decision
making, and the sharing of resources. As sociologist Charles Payne
points out, this vision echoes the memories Baker treasured from her
childhood in North Carolina during the early 1900s. She often spoke
fondly of a time when mutual obligation and shared resources were the
ties that bound small southern black communities together and brought
out the best in the individual members of those communities.93 The plan
of the organization was that all profits earned by shareholders would be
“used for the common good”; profits were to be reinvested in “clinics,
libraries, and cooperative housing to combat slums.”94 In a 1935 article
for the Amsterdam News, Baker articulated her hope that the new
cooperative ventures would be harbingers of “the day when the soil and
all of its resources will be reclaimed by its rightful owners—the working
masses of the world.”95 In her 1935 view of the world, a redistribution of
wealth had to be a part of any radical reorganization of society.
The YNCL was not formally linked to any socialist or communist party,
and its founders were harshly critical of the weaknesses of much of the
organized left. Yet the YNCL's leaders had their own vision, however
elusive, of how their efforts could transform society and eradicate
capitalism. George Schuyler was firm and outspoken in his
condemnation of the evils of modern capitalism, and Ella Baker shared
that critique. This conviction was central in Schuyler's call for the
formation of consumer cooperatives. In a 1930 column, Schuyler
identified capitalism as the cause of much of the suffering experienced
by African American people. He responded sharply to an anticommunist
critic:
[W]hen the best minds of the age are questioning how long an
economic system can last that exploits its slaves and does not even
protect them from hunger and the elements; when we see capitalistic
governments advocating many policies that were suggested by
Socialists 50 years ago, and finally, when capitalism has been the
greatest factor in the ravishing of Africa and the degradation of her
transplanted sons and daughters, it sounds strange to hear a smug little
Negro editor criticize other Negroes because they have the intellectual
courage, ability and vision to study socialism and bolshevism.96
Linking economic exploitation, enslavement, and colonialism,
Schuyler proclaimed that only a left-wing analysis could adequately
address the problems facing the race. The progress of the race depended
on a clearsighted critique of the class dynamics of American capitalism.
Schuyler outlined the YNCL's long-term objectives in terms that stressed
the group's unique combination of revolutionary goals with an
evolutionary process of social transformation:
Co-operative democracy means a social order in which the mills,
mines, railroads, farms, markets, houses, shops and all the other
necessary means of production, distribution and exchange are owned
cooperatively by those who produce, operate and use them.
Whereas the Socialists hope to usher in such a Utopia society by
the ballot and the Communists hope to turn the trick with the bullet,
the cooperator (who is really an Anarchist since the triumph of his
society will do away with the state in its present form—and I am an
Anarchist) is slowly and methodically doing so through legal,
intelligent economic cooperation or mutual aid.97
Schuyler claimed to be an anarchist in part to be provocative. He
identified with a freer form of radicalism that rejected the strictures of a
Soviet-style state or the centralized hierarchy of a Bolshevik-type
vanguard party. He seems to have embraced socialist ideals, not socialist
or communist parties.
Baker did not share all of Schuyler's views, but she did share his
optimism about the cooperative movement, proclaiming that “from
economic planning must spring our second emancipation.”98 For the rest
of her life she challenged the inequities inherent in a capitalist society. In
an article published in 1970, for example, Baker argued that “only basic
changes in the social structure of the country will be adequate to the
needs of the poor, both black and white,” given that “in the midst of such
great wealth, millions are impoverished.”99
The YNCL and the concept of economic cooperation enjoyed a very
broad base of support that spanned the spectrum of African American
political thought during the early 1930s. Such moderate black leaders as
newspaper publisher Robert Vann, Howard University president
Mordecai Johnson, and Benjamin Brawley of Shaw, expressed support
for the organization, although none of them were socialists, much less
philosophical anarchists. These unlikely associations suggest two things.
First, cooperative economics was rooted in the long-standing tradition of
black self-help, mutual aid, and uplift, so it had wide appeal to both
small entrepreneurs and socialists. Cooperatives could be viewed as a
way of navigating the racist stumbling blocks within American
capitalism; alternatively, they could be seen as a direct challenge to its
legitimacy. Second, in a time of systemic economic crisis, many small
business people were eager to try any methods they could, however
unorthodox, to keep their businesses afloat. For blacks in particular, the
repertoire of survival strategies included the pooling of resources and a
willingness to at least temporarily substitute cooperation for competition.
Baker and Schuyler were heirs to a long tradition of mutual aid in the
African American community, and many black organizers had seen
cooperatives as an avenue for economic improvement. During the 1920s
and 1930s, several organizations and leaders, including, most notably, W.
E. B. Du Bois, advocated similar strategies. According to historian
Manning Marable, Du Bois's commitment to all-black cooperative
ventures was consistent with his deepening socialist vision and simply
took into account the reality of American racial politics in the Jim Crow
era. Du Bois, in Marable's words, “firmly believed that the Negro middle
class could lead black workers to a moderate socialist program. In a
series of articles in the Pittsburgh Courier, Du Bois explained that the
entire working class could ‘make one assault upon poverty and race
hate.’ But to begin this process, black Americans had to build their own
separate organizations along cooperative lines.”100 Du Bois held the
view, Marable concludes, that “the rise of black cooperativism would
ultimately establish a unity between workers of both races.”101 In other
words, African Americans had to initiate a transitional strategy toward
socialism that made political sense within the confines of Jim Crow.
Toward this end, Du Bois “supported the development of black
cooperatives.”102
Varied political tendencies can be identified under the rubric of the
cooperative movement. Du Bois represented one strain, while Father
Divine represented quite another. A flamboyant and controversial
messianic religious leader who professed no socialist aspirations
whatsoever, Divine adopted cooperative methods and rhetoric in building
his religious empire. He organized soup kitchens, stores, and nurseries
by calling on his followers to pool their meager resources and labor
together under the banner of self-help. Divine's cooperative enterprises
did help many poor black people to survive during hard times. Contrary
to the YNCL's policy of channeling profits into community projects,
however, Divine siphoned off a good chunk of the excess to support his
own lavish lifestyle.103 Some supporters of cooperatives had more
straightforward, pragmatic goals. Many small business people entered
into partnerships and joint, bulk-buying arrangements to minimize their
costs and maximize their profits. Although advocates of “black
capitalism” supported cooperatives, most of them strongly disapproved
of the YNCL. For example, in 1933 the YNCL was sharply criticized by the
conservative Colored Merchants Association and the National Negro
Business League. Schuyler predictably reacted with biting criticisms of
his own.104
The YNCL was a short-lived experiment in collective black selfdetermination. Like many economic cooperatives, it was unable to
survive the concrete pressures of a dominant social and economic system
antithetical to its aims or to sustain a mass base of committed supporters.
It proved especially difficult to hammer out a daily practice to implement
the group's long-term goals. The organization was plagued by monetary
woes from its inception and eventually collapsed under the weight of
financial obligations that could not be met. Schuyler's biographer,
Michael Peplow, attributes the failure of the YNCL not only to the lack of
capital and financial support but also to the fact that Schuyler's
inflammatory remarks about the black church and the black middle class
had made him too many enemies.105
Rooted in the idealism of the utopian socialist communities of the
nineteenth century, cooperatives held out the illusory hope of creating an
oasis of economic democracy in the midst of a capitalist society, an
objective rife with pitfalls and contradictions from the outset. Schuyler
traveled to England and met with organizers of the famous British
cooperative movement to garner lessons to ensure the longevity and
stability of the YNCL, but the odds were against the venture.106
Cooperatives needed capital, which few black people had even during
the best of times. In the depths of the Great Depression, the minimum
funds required to sustain stable buying coops were simply unavailable.
Cooperatives were not a short-term solution to economic woes; they
needed considerable time to demonstrate progress. In such urgent and
uncertain times, most people were not confident or patient enough to
allow them to work. The co-ops that did succeed were absorbed into the
dominant economy.
Still, the cooperative movement held a special appeal for Ella Baker.
Given the range of political organizations based in New York City during
the early 1930s, why did she choose to dedicate her efforts to the YNCL?
One reason is that the cooperative philosophy resonated with many of
the ideals that were instilled in her as a child. She brought her memories
and ideals of community solidarity in the rural South to bear on the
predicament in which she found oppressed black people in the urban
North.
Judging from the political views that the mature Ella Baker articulated
during the 1960s, there are other ways in which the YNCL must have
appealed to and influenced her as well. Baker's political philosophy
called for challenging the laws and institutions of society in order to
eliminate discrimination and inequity, but at the same time she felt
strongly that any movement for social change must transform the
individuals involved— their values, priorities, and modes of personal
interaction. Baker expressed this viewpoint as early as the 1940s, and it
remained a constant theme in her politics thereafter. The cooperative
movement offered organizers a way of working with people on a
protracted, day-to-day basis. The process of setting up co-ops,
establishing common priorities for those involved, solidifying
democratic methods of decision making, and building communications
networks encouraged people at the grassroots to engage in social change
and transformation, changing themselves, each other, and the world
around them simultaneously. Unlike such singular events as voting on
election day or attending a political rally, involvement in cooperatives
and buying clubs enabled people to redefine the ways in which they
related to neighbors, friends, and co-workers. For Baker, political
struggle was, above all, a process, and she insisted that the structure of
political organizations had to allow for the process of personal and
political transformation to occur.
In many respects, the YNCL experiment foreshadowed a very similar
organization with which Baker would be closely affiliated some thirty
years later, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Both organizations were decidedly independent of more moderate black
leadership. Both embraced the concept of leadership at the grassroots as
opposed to a top-down model. And both focused on youth as a cutting-
edge force for social change. The two groups certainly had different
goals and emerged from distinctly different historical contexts. But
parallels are clear: both the YNCL and SNCC were distinguished from other
contemporary organizations by their focus on grassroots education,
democratic decision-making, and a step-by-step, transformative process
of working toward long-term goals. The connection between the YNCL
and SNCC in Baker's own life history illuminates the carryover of
strategies for resistance and change, which were passed on through
conduits like Ella Baker from generation to generation. Since the YNCL
was so crucial in shaping Baker's own political thinking, she presumably
drew on many of the lessons and mistakes of that experience in the
efforts to launch and sustain SNCC during the early 1960s.
Her years in the YNCL left Baker with a wealth of political experience,
but her lack of any real material wealth took its toll. Throughout the
depression, she suffered bouts of unemployment and was in a perpetual
state of financial instability. Her predicament was shared by many other
educated people, both black and white, but her commitment to voluntary
political organizing kept her poorer than some. To make ends meet,
Baker took short-term jobs whenever they were available, often finding
them through friends. In the summer of 1934, she worked with the
World's Fair Boosters and Friends of Africa, in their offices on 135th
Street, to promote black attendance at the fair and coordinate the Negro
exhibits. She worked briefly, along with John Henrik Clarke, on the
Youth Committee of 100 against Lynching; with Lester Granger at the
New York Urban League; with Harlem's Own Cooperative; and with the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.107 Some of this was volunteer
work, and some provided her with a nominal salary. She also did
freelance writing for a wide variety of periodicals and worked as office
manager for the National News, a short-lived publication edited by
Schuyler that was geared toward a black readership. Finally, Les Granger
told her about job openings at the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Baker immediately “went down and signed up.”108
THE WORKERS EDUCATION PROJECT
In October 1936, Baker began working as a consumer education teacher
for the Workers Education Project (WEP) of the WPA, based initially in
offices on Broadway across from City Hall and later on 14th Street in
lower Manhattan.109 Her experience in coordinating and conducting
education programs in the cooperative movement qualified her for this
assignment. The WPA was one of numerous New Deal agencies set up
during the depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to combat
massive unemployment through the creation of government-funded jobs.
Employment programs designed specifically for educated workers aimed
to use their talents for the public good: artists created murals and
sculptures for public buildings; the Federal Theatre hired actors and
directors to stage plays for popular audiences; the Federal Writers
Project compiled guides to states and collected historical documents.
Black leaders close to the Roosevelt administration made sure that black
artists, writers, and teachers were not denied access to employment
programs for educated workers, and some projects documented and
supported African American culture.110
The WEP consisted of 1,000 teachers nationwide who were
sympathetic with the militant forces within the burgeoning trade union
movement, specifically the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
The project's official purpose was to “cooperate with union officials and
community leaders in organizing and conducting classes in workers' and
consumers' problems.”111WEP teachers held classes in settlement houses,
union halls, churches, and workplaces, and discussions ranged from
practical questions about the social security program to the growth of
fascism abroad.112 The New York City office had a staff of about eighty
and was supervised by Isabel Taylor, “a mild-mannered woman whose
background included settlement house work in the tradition of Jane
Addams, and working with coal mining families in Pennsylvania.”113
Initially, according to Baker's friend and WEP co-worker Conrad Lynn,
“the government felt we [in the WEP] should be neutral in the struggle
between capital and labor … but we won the right to study the history of
the labor movement,” which soon became a primary focus of the group's
work.114 Lynn recalled how prolabor WEP teachers tried to infuse radical
politics into their classes. “We ferreted out instances of exploitation of
workers, educating them about instances such as the famous Triangle
Shirtwaist fire in which dozens of workers were killed due to the unsafe
conditions they were forced to work under.” Such lessons, Lynn
admitted, were intended to motivate workers to join the growing trade
union movement.115 Baker's long-time friend Pauli Murray, who also
worked with the WEP, made the case for partisanship even more strongly
in a 1938 report on how to improve the project's efforts. In her view,
teachers needed to bolster workers' confidence so that they would not be
“satisfied with things as they are.” She felt that the WEP should encourage
black workers, in particular, to overcome feelings of “inferiority and
timidity” and to “see the world as theirs and from which they have a
right to take what rightfully belongs to them.”116
Ella Baker was recognized as a successful educator within the WEP.
Soon after joining the WPA, she was promoted to assistant project
supervisor in the Manhattan office of the WEP. There, Baker coordinated
and conducted workshops on consumer issues for church, labor, and
community groups. She was also the author of several publications,
including a study guide on consumer issues that was distributed
nationwide.117 Like Lynn and Murray, Baker strove to politicize the
content of her work and radicalize her students by linking the problems
of consumers with larger issues of inequality and the need for social
change. A flyer announcing one of Baker's consumer education
workshops read: “Some consumers organize to save money, others to
save the world—what does consumer education mean to you?”118 Her
syllabi posed such questions as “Why so much poverty in so rich a
country as America?” and “What role can organized and dynamic
consumer action play in issuing in a new social order?”119
Baker undertook concerted efforts to make consumer education
available and accessible to black Americans, who might otherwise not
have seen WEP programs as relevant to them. She conducted workshops
in Harlem, holding classes in old storefronts and at workplaces, and
created an educational exhibit on consumer issues in Harlem Hospital to
accommodate hospital employees, especially nurses who might not have
otherwise attended.120 Pauli Murray shared Baker's goal of making the
WEP more accessible to black workers and supported her efforts, praising
Baker's work in Harlem and urging the office to lend more publicity to
the work.121
The WEP provided a serious political education for the teachers it
employed. “We had few guidelines and we learned as we taught, pooling
our experiences,” recalled Murray. “We also had to familiarize ourselves
with the immediate problems of clothing workers, Pullman car porters,
domestic workers, transport workers, sales clerks, the unemployed, or
whatever groups we were assigned to. We had to be well informed on
contemporary social, economic and political issues to satisfy the demand
among workers for discussions of political events.”122 The WEP teachers
learned from their dialogues with adult students and from their debates
with one another. They studied, argued, and grappled on a day-to-day
basis with the most pressing economic and political problems of the
time. Looking back decades later, Conrad Lynn was convinced that he
had encountered “some of the best political minds collected under one
roof” while working there.123 In the WEP, young radical intellectuals
hammered out together new approaches to social change.
The WEP was host to virtually every sector of the American left, from
proponents of labor union organizing and independent socialists to
members of the Communist Party. Baker recalled their passionate
debates with pleasure: “You had every spectrum of radical thinking on
the WPA. We had a lovely time… . Boy it was good, stimulating.”124 In
this intellectually dynamic environment, where theories were tested
against the experiences of working adults as well as against alternative
points of view, many of the amorphous ideals that had attracted Baker to
the YNCL were challenged and refined. The YNCL had introduced Baker to
progressive politics; in the WEP, her ideas were forged into a coherent
political analysis.
Baker also studied and taught in the workers' education program at
the Rand School for Social Science, located on East 15th Street in Lower
Manhattan. In 1936, while she was working for the WEP, Baker attended
classes at the Rand School, and by 1937 she was teaching consumer
issues at the school's weekly afternoon classes for women.125 Founded in
1906 by members of the American Socialist Society and funded by
Carrie Sherfey Rand, a wealthy Iowa radical and former abolitionist, the
school offered courses on socialist theory, economics, and labor history
and hosted such notable intellectuals as John Dewey, Bertrand Russell,
and Charles Beard. By the 1930s the school's cafeteria, classrooms, and
bookstore were hangouts for an interracial crowd of young radical
thinkers and activists.126 Her experience as a student and teacher at the
Rand School was another part of Baker's deepening involvement in and
exposure to leftist politics in New York City.
In the WEP office where Baker worked, there were constant debates
and discussions about such topics as the future of socialism, the
relationship of the communist movement to the struggle for Negro rights,
how to structure organizations democratically, the rise of fascism in
Europe, and the future of colonialism in Africa. Her coworkers included
Conrad Lynn, a lawyer for the Young Communist League; Agnes
Martuoucci, a member of the Socialist Party; and Pauli Murray, who
supported the independent socialist faction led by Jay Lovestone. “You
had every splinter of the CP,” Baker recalled, as well as a variety of
socialists and independent radicals. In describing the backgrounds of her
co-workers at the WEP, Baker remembered that many of her white
colleagues were so-called red diaper babies who had been brought up in
leftist families, but who “had become disillusioned with the bringing in
of the socialist order through the CP, and yet who couldn't leave the
idea.”127 They were actively looking for socialist alternatives. Lynn
echoed Baker's assessment: the WEP staff “were men and women
committed to the cause of labor, and they represented every party and
tendency of the left. For the first time Trotskyists, Lovestoneites,
Stammites, Socialists, Anarchists, and Henry Georgeites mingled with
orthodox Communists.”128
In this new environment, Baker clarified her thinking about class, and
began to put her ideas about education and social change into practice.
The philosophy of education that she expressed during her work for the
WEP reflects some key features of her larger political vision. One of the
main goals of workers' education, according to Baker, was to provide the
worker with “a more intelligent understanding of the social and political
economy of which he is a part.”129 For Baker, consumer issues were not
apolitical matters that affected everyone regardless of their economic
position. She pointed out that although “everyone is a consumer … here,
we are primarily concerned with the wage earner whose income fails to
satisfy the needs and desires of himself and his family … and who can
find small comfort and little hope in our present economy.”130 In
describing her approach to consumer education, Baker insisted that “the
aim is not education for its own sake, but education that leads to selfdirected action.”131 Consumer politics were one aspect of a larger class
struggle between the haves and have-nots. Baker saw consumers as
workers at the other end of the production process and struggle over
consumer power as analogous to the struggle for workers' power on the
factory floor. As she put it in her syllabus: “All work is but a means to
the end of meeting consumer demands. The ‘real wage’ is what the pay
envelope will actually buy. The wage-earner's well-being is determined
as much at the points of distribution and consumption as at the point of
production… . Since recurrent ‘business slumps’ and the increased
mechanization of industry tend to decrease the primal importance of the
worker as producer, he must be oriented to the increasingly more
important role of consumer.”132
In other words, organization at the point of consumption was
potentially as important as the Marxist strategy of organization at the
point of production. By acting collectively as consumers and as workers,
ordinary people could influence the economy and improve the condition
of their lives. In her WEP course syllabus, Baker raised fundamental
questions about the economic injustice of American capitalism and
suggested that an independent, aggressive consumer movement had an
important role to play in changing that system.133 She clearly saw her
work as a part of a bigger process of social and economic change along
socialist lines.
The WEP exposed Baker to the entire spectrum of leftist political
ideologies and factions. She was a careful observer and critic of the left
and had many close friends in opposing organizations and parties. In her
opinion, the Communist Party “was the most articulate group for social
action. [It] may not have been well organized all the time, but it was
articulate.”134Charles Payne points out that Baker also admired the
localized “cell structure” of the CP, which could be interpreted any
number of ways, but, given the trajectory of Baker's politics after the
1930s, it is likely that she simply valued the localized process of
intensive small-group discussion and planning that a “cell” structure
composed of small units that worked closely together would allow for.135
Baker respected the CP's leadership in organizing white and black
industrial workers during the 1930s, and its white members were some of
the staunchest antiracists around. However, her criticisms of the party,
which she did not write down, seem to have outweighed her praise.136
Baker's relationships with CP members were not governed by the
politically expedient notion of “live and let live.” Rather, she constantly
struggled with her friends and comrades around points of disagreement.
Conrad Lynn, one of her closest CP friends, recalled that Baker often
“shoved reading material under my nose critical of the Communist
Party.” Yet the two remained lifelong friends.137 Even though Baker was
more closely associated with the socialists, rather than the communists,
in Harlem, she never endorsed the “militant anticommunism” of some of
her friends, such as A. Philip Randolph, who, according to historian
Mark Naison, took the position that “communism represented a ‘Fifth
Column’ in American life that had to be destroyed at all costs.”138
Among all the various and competing leftist organizations active in
New York during the 1930s, Baker was particularly sympathetic to the
Love-stonites, an independent socialist faction named after its leader, Jay
Lovestone, who had split from the Community Party during the late
1920s.139 In interviews, John Henrik Clarke and Conrad Lynn agreed
about Baker's Lovestonite affiliation.140 The fact that one of Baker's
closest friends, Pauli Murray, supported Lovestone adds weight to Lynn's
and Clarke's recollections.141 Lovestone and his followers were critical
of the Communist Party's view of the Bolshevik revolution as a virtual
blueprint for socialist revolutions worldwide. As proponents of a brand
of American exceptionalism, they believed that the United States had to
follow its own path toward socialism. Lovestone had been general
secretary of the Workers (Communist) Party during the late 1920s, when
the so-called Negro question was being hotly debated within party
circles. Before he was ousted in 1929, Lovestone and his black and white
allies within the party opposed the notion of black self-determination
founded on the idea of a southern-based Negro “nation within a nation,”
which was introduced at the Sixth Congress of the Communist
International in Moscow in 1930. Lovestone had little confidence in
organizing in the agrarian South and thought that the party should urge
blacks to migrate to the industrial North instead.142 Lovestone advocated
interracial organizing on the basis of common class interests. One of his
strongest black supporters within the party was Lovett Fort-Whiteman,
who coauthored an internal party document that called for the abolition
of the party-run American Negro Labor Congress on the grounds that it
unfairly segregated black workers coming into the party. Those on the
other side of the debate countered that critics of the American Negro
Labor Congress and the self-determination position were minimizing
race and suggesting that it was marginal to the class struggle.143
Lovestone recognized that racism was a problem within the party as well
as in the nation as a whole, and he maintained that the party should fight
“white chauvinism” and upgrade “Negro work.”144
According to historian Paul Buhle, the Lovestonite faction, after its
expulsion from the Workers (Communist) Party, encouraged “a
rethinking of communist policies in a more open fashion” while
promoting an aggressive agenda, including the development of a
Worker's School headed by Bertram Wolfe.145 The group, in Buhle's
assessment, maintained a “small but vital intellectual following” in the
early thirties.146 Baker may have been drawn to the Lovestonites' lively
intellectual debates and emphasis on radical education. The group's
interracial composition and its commitment to understanding the
connections between racial injustice and class inequality would also have
appealed to her. Whatever the attraction to the controversial group,
Baker's affiliation with Lovestone was a loose one at best.
Baker was well informed about left political theory and questioned all
the viewpoints. She read and debated Marxist ideas regularly with her
co-workers in the WEP, but she was never known to toe a “party line” of
any type. Indeed, she was a vigorous opponent of sectarianism, regarding
organizational splits over abstractions as destructive to organizing for
change. Baker's interest in Marxism was an extension of her openminded exploration of a wide spectrum of political views. According to
some of her friends, she was fairly promiscuous in her political
associations during and after the 1930s. It did not matter whether she
dealt with communists, Lovestonites, socialists, or ardent Garveyites; she
was eager to engage them all. This openness to diverse political views
and ideologies characterized much of her political life. Anyone
concerned with social and economic justice, civil rights, and human
progress was a potential ally—or at least worthy of a hearty debate. Even
at this early stage of her political career, Baker was a catalyst for
bringing people together. She was a common denominator among the
varied and often contentious segments of Harlem's progressive political
community. “Characters of all the various political stripes would drop by
Ella's apartment, just for the political challenge of it. She would argue
her point one day,” John Henrik Clarke recalled, “and see you on the
street and hug you the next. Principled disagreements were not a basis to
shut anybody out.”147
INTERNATIONALISM AND THE BLACK
DIASPORA
Moving from the provincial South to metropolitan Harlem opened
Baker's eyes to the variety of black diasporic cultures and politics. One
of the things Baker loved about New York was its global character, a
multinationalism that permeated the political and cultural life of the city.
Baker marveled that “if ever there was any ferment across the ocean in
terms of social action and development of political parties like
communist, socialist, etc., New York became the place where it birthed
and blossomed most.”148 During the 1930s, Baker, like many African
Americans, took a greater interest in world affairs and U.S. foreign
policy. As John Henrik Clarke put it, “black took on a bigger meaning
and freedom took on a global character.”149
In 1932, Baker worked as a reporter for the West Indian News and
familiarized herself with Caribbean politics and culture; she also became
acquainted with the Caribbean socialist Richard Moore.150 In January
1937, when England sent troops to suppress a strike by oil workers in the
British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, Baker took a stand in support of
the striking workers. She had lengthy conversations with her friend
Conrad Lynn about the incident, firing him up so much that he disrupted
a meeting of the New York City Committee of the Communist Party by
demanding that they funnel aid to the embattled black strikers.151 The CP
committee refused, and Lynn walked out of the meeting threatening to
resign his membership in protest. Lynn recounted this dramatic incident
in his autobiography, There Is a Fountain, but only years later did he
mention that his conversations with Ella Baker were the impetus for his
actions.152
During 1934-35, when the Italian dictator, Mussolini, moved to annex
the African nation of Ethiopia, thousands of Harlemites mobilized to
protest the violation of Ethiopia's autonomy and to support the Ethiopian
resistance. Ella Baker lent her voice in support of this international
campaign, marching in demonstrations, attending meetings, and
circulating petitions under the organizational banner of the American
League against War and Fascism.153 The league held a major march
through Harlem on August 3, 1935, which brought out nearly 25,000
people.154 Baker's close relationship with one of the key leaders of the
Ethiopian aid campaign, Rev. William Lloyd Imes, suggests that she may
have played more of a role in this effort than extant documents
indicate.155 In “Light on a Dark Continent,” an unpublished article on the
richness of African history written by Baker in the late 1930s, she
directly challenged the bias of Eurocentric histories, pointing out that, in
fact, the so-called Dark Continent of Africa was the birthplace of the
human species.156 These words and activities indicate that Baker's
politics were framed by a much larger internationalist perspective and
included a particular concern with the issues of African colonialism and
independence.
Pan-Africanism linked the liberation of people of African descent
throughout the diaspora to the struggle for self-determination on the
continent of Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of its major proponents
within the United States, advocating solidarity among black people
around the world but rejecting any type of narrow, racial separatism at
home. Baker's internationalist stance and her critique of black
nationalism went hand in hand as well. She was indubitably a “race
woman,” unapologetic about her love and affinity for black people, and
she situated herself politically and personally within a diverse and
sometimes fractious black community. She lived her entire adult life in
the historically and culturally rich black enclave of Harlem out of choice
rather than necessity. But her affinity and sense of community did not
stop there. Baker's class analysis and political perspective suggested the
need for cooperation and coalition building with other oppressed people,
regardless of race. The Young Negroes' Cooperative League was the only
all-black organization with which Baker was affiliated, and the YNCL
maintained amicable relations with nonblack organizations, especially
cooperatives, that had similar economic and political goals. Baker never
worked with organizations that espoused narrow nationalist ideas or
advocated Garvey-style separatism. Her views on these questions closely
resembled those of Du Bois. They both recognized that, in a historical
period defined by Jim Crow segregation, all-black organizations were
necessary modes of self-help and group empowerment, yet they did not
preclude working with predominantly white or multiracial organizations
simultaneously or in the future.157 In the economic crisis of the
depression, African Americans had to take immediate steps to resist
oppression and ensure their survival. They could work toward
establishing principled, enduring coalitions with whites and with other
people of color, especially on issues of economic justice, but coalitionbuilding was a protracted process and was most effectively conducted
from a strong, autonomous base.
Baker saw the necessity of forming alliances across racial lines and
national boundaries on pragmatic political grounds. In response to
remarks made by a Philadelphia minister urging blacks to pull
themselves up by their bootstraps, that is, without allies, she argued in an
unpublished essay written around 1940:
I could but think “how true and yet how false.” True that a new
economic order must be built, but false to hope that it can be built by
the Negro alone on any policy of racial isolation. True that the Negro's
future will be determined by his own efforts, but false to expect …
that it can be achieved by … racial isolation. While we are tugging at
our own bootstraps, we must realize that our interests are more often
than not identical to that of others. We must recognize the identity of
interests, work with other groups … [and yet not sacrifice our interests
to that of the larger cause]. A difficult but unavoidable task.158
Baker, like Du Bois, combined a commitment to self-determination with
a vision of social and political transformation in which African
Americans would work alongside other oppressed groups to establish a
new social and economic order. The international perspective that
enabled Du Bois and Baker to link black Americans' struggles with those
of Africans and others against colonialism was key to their ability to
untie the knot that, within the United States, too often made selfdetermination and multiracial organizing look like antitheses rather than
compatible, even mutually necessary goals.
Baker's internationalism and her commitment to coalition-building
remained steadfast throughout her long political life. She connected
racial and economic injustice and looked to other oppressed groups as
potential allies. In 1968, for example, Baker observed: “The logical
groups for the black masses to coalesce with would be the impoverished
whites, the mis-represented and impoverished Indians, and the alienated
Mexican-Americans. These are the natural allies in my book.”159 Baker
later expressed her internationalist views by her involvement in the
Puerto Rican solidarity movement, the struggle against colonialism in
Africa, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. She also made deliberate
efforts to expose civil rights activists to struggles in other parts of the
world. Although Baker never traveled outside the United States, her
universal vision of politics and human rights encompassed the globe and
linked her with individuals from the Caribbean to the African continent.
The foundations of this internationalist perspective were laid in Harlem
during the 1930s.
A MOST UNCONVENTIONAL MARRIAGE
Some time in the early 1930s, there are conflicting accounts on exactly
when, Ella Baker moved out of her cousin's apartment and into a place of
her own, located across from a small park on St. Nicholas and West 133d
Streets.160 This was a bold and unconventional act. Baker was aware that
“for black women from nice homes”—“[n]ice religious homes”—to be
living alone in a big city like New York was frowned on.161 But she was
not overly concerned about what other people thought of her choices.
The new apartment afforded her privacy, space enough to gather with
groups of friends, and the ability to come and go as she pleased. When
asked years later if her mother, Anna, had approved of the move and her
New York lifestyle, Baker responded that it really didn't matter, since she
was too far away to do anything about it.162
Baker's early years in New York City were dominated by professional
and political activities, though she did have a few personal friends,
including the Schuylers. She occasionally got together with Emma
Lance, who worked on the WPA-sponsored Federal Theatre Project, to
“drink a few beers and talk over matters of ‘Affairs of State,’ as well as
romance.”163 In a very frank and detailed letter to Ella after the two
women had not seen one another in some time, Emma confided
irreverently that she was dating two men at the same time but was still
working too hard to devote proper attention to either one. Her level of
candor and disclosure suggests that the two women were quite close. A
male friend, Freeman Hubbard, also confided in Baker about his love life
and other personal matters, at one point chastising “busy little Ella” for
not keeping in closer touch.164
Soon after Ella arrived in New York, her boyfriend from back home,
T. J. Roberts, or Bob as she called him, began sending telegrams
declaring his affection and longing to be with her. Addressing her as
“darling” and “sweetheart,” Bob promised Ella that he was “still loving
you” despite their distance.165 The two kept up an active
correspondence, augmented by phone calls between 1927 and 1930. At
times, Bob complained that Ella had not responded quickly enough to his
previous telegram or call; it appears that on other occasions Bob had let
the communication between them lag. They professed their love for one
another, and both expressed a desire to be together. Eventually, after
years of separation punctuated by her visits home and his visits to New
York, they decided to get married.166 Roberts and Baker shared the
apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem for nearly twenty years.
The marriage was anything but traditional. Baker never assumed her
husband's surname, an unusual act of independence during the 1930s.
When Baker was visiting her family in Littleton, one of her cousins
asked what had possessed her to keep her own last name after she
married. “I had it all this time, I just figured I would keep it,” she
explained matter-of-factly.167 Nor did she stay home in Harlem to
perform whatever wifely duties might have been expected of women of
her generation. From her first years as an organizer and educator for the
YNCL,
she had traveled wherever her work took her. Baker did not change
this pattern when she married; in 1941, she accepted a job as a field
organizer for the NAACP that required her to be away for weeks at a time.
Roberts was a quiet and gentle man who did not interfere with Ella's
principal passion, which was politics. Indeed, he kept such a low profile
that when the FBI was spying on Baker during the 1940s they assumed he
was a female relative living with her and apparently had no idea she was
married.168 Many close friends were also unaware of what Baker later
referred to as her “domestic arrangement.”169
Although Baker was married to Roberts for many years, she seems
never to have treated him as an integral part of her life or as an
influencing force in her thinking. In interviews conducted over many
years, she repeatedly minimized the importance of her married life,
denied that it had any relevance to her political work, and declined to
answer probing questions that attempted to unravel her marital mystery.
Student activists with whom Baker worked during the 1960s remember
her being open and frank about almost everything except her marriage.
“It was one of the few things she just wouldn't talk about,” recalled
Bernice Johnson Reagon.170 “When I asked her about her husband she
would say, ‘oh no, it's not important,’” remembers Joyce Ladner.171
Baker bluntly told an interviewer not to “get too personal” when she
broached the subject of marriage.172 “Many people didn't even know
Miss Baker had ever been married; she was explicitly Miss Baker” to
most of her political associates.173
Ella Baker's deliberate silence about her married life makes it difficult
for a biographer to do more than document the fact of her marriage and
acknowledge this gap in the story she told about her life. Yet her papers
and her friends' observations of her and her husband during these years
do offer some clues about the relationship. Although Roberts was never
as politically active as Baker, he was a fighter in his own way, refusing
to accept indignities meted out routinely to blacks and demanding fair
treatment when and where he could. When Roberts was treated rudely by
a clerk in a Miami, Florida, railway station while he was traveling, he
wrote a strong letter of complaint to the railway company insisting on an
apology.174 During the 1940s, Roberts was active in the tenants' rights
group in their Harlem apartment building at 452 St. Nicholas Avenue,175
one of the few contexts in which the twosome had an open, public
identity as a married couple.176 Roberts was willing to fight when issues
had an immediate impact on him and his loved ones. He left the larger
political battles to Baker.
John Henrik Clarke, who met Ella Baker through the Committee of
100 against Lynching, knew the couple well during the 1930s and
frequently visited their apartment. According to Clarke, the marriage was
not a union of equals. Roberts “was out of his league with Ella,” Clarke
observed. “She took him in like a little puppy out of the rain. I think she
sort of felt sorry for him.”177 “He had his interests and she had hers,”
recalled another close friend.178 Despite their differences, the couple
stayed together and weathered some difficult years. They were often
separated by the demands of their jobs: Baker's work for the NAACP
required extensive travel, and Roberts's work in the refrigeration
business also took him on the road quite a bit. Undoubtedly, being apart
so much put a strain on their relationship. After a period of separation
and an attempted reconciliation, which included marital counseling from
a Harlem pastor, the marriage was not salvageable and finally ended in
divorce in 1958.179 Years later, Baker and her niece, Jackie Brockington,
who had lived with the couple for several years, attended Bob Roberts's
funeral to pay their respects.180 Even after the marriage ended,
connections and obligations remained. Just as she didn't write off
political friends, she was not prepared to write Bob off either, even if
they were no longer a couple.
The late 1930s were especially difficult years for Baker personally
and financially. On December 11, 1938, two days before Ella's thirtyfifth birthday, her father died, leaving her mother alone and economically
vulnerable. Ella had developed an independent identity during her years
in Harlem, but now she was recast as an adult daughter with significant
responsibility for her aging mother. Ella had always been the responsible
one, not Maggie, so the burden fell on her shoulders. It was difficult for
Ella to contribute to the support of her kin when it was so hard to find
paid work herself. Her marriage did not improve her financial situation,
since both she and Roberts had difficulty keeping jobs. This problem was
so common during the depression that many couples postponed marriage
for years because of financial uncertainty. By 1939, Baker and her new
husband were nearly destitute. Bob Roberts answered a New York Times
classified ad for a couple to work as janitors, an indication of just how
desperate they were.181 Ella Baker wrote letters to the New York
Housing Authority, the American League for Peace and Democracy, and
other organizations inquiring about possible employment, all to no avail.
In 1940, she applied unsuccessfully for an emergency loan from a New
York charity, pointing out that she did so only as “a last resort” after an
extended period of unemployment.182 John Henrik Clarke recalled that
“Ella was always broke and always borrowing money from one friend or
another.”183
Money was never important to Baker. She focused on her political
work and thought about money only when there was none. In 1938 she
applied for a job as youth coordinator for the NAACP. Two years later,
they hired her as an assistant field secretary, which launched another
phase of her political career as a grassroots organizer and guaranteed a
steady income at least for a while.
Baker was always a fiercely independent soul who routinely shunned
convention and refused to be corralled into the prescribed roles that
others wanted her to play. In college, she was a rebel, albeit a reluctant
one, who defied the rigid rules and bureaucratic hierarchy of Shaw's
administration. During her early years in Harlem, she quickly evolved
from a curious and naive young rebel to a serious and committed leftwing radical. Reflecting on her arrival in Harlem, Baker recalled: “I,
perhaps at that stage, had the kind of ambition that others may have …
the world was out there waiting for you to provide a certain kind of
leadership and give you the opportunity. But with the Depression, I
began to see that there were certain social forces over which the
individual had very little control. It wasn't an easy lesson. It was out of
that context that I began to explore more in the areas of ideology and
theory regarding social change.”184
This realization was a turning point in Baker's life. After nearly a
decade in Harlem, working in various political organizations and
studying a wide range of ideas about social change, she rejected much of
the middle-class “grooming” she had received at home and at Shaw and
instead became a radical activist and grassroots organizer. Baker
forfeited many of the class privileges that her education and talents
might have afforded her. She chose instead to struggle on behalf of the
oppressed. Her rewards were not material ones.
4 FIGHTING HER OWN WARS
THE NAACP NATIONAL OFFICE, 1940–1946
We must have the “nerve” to take the Association to people wherever
they are.
Ella Baker, 1941
Give people light and they will find a way.
Ella Baker, 1944
In December 1940, as fascism swept across Europe and North Africa and
the United States vacillated about entering the conflict, Ella Baker
enlisted in another war—the war against American racism—by joining
the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), one of the fastest-growing black freedom organizations.
After two years of trying to get her foot in the door at the NAACP,
Baker had landed a job as assistant field secretary, earning $29 a week.1
She was ecstatic. What could be better than getting paid to fight the
system? Throughout the remainder of the decade, as the predominantly
male spokespersons for black America made pronouncements about the
war, federal legislation, and world affairs, organizers like Ella Baker
were fighting in the trenches of southern battlefields for social and
economic justice for African Americans. Through their actions, they
were making real the national black freedom slogan of “double victory,”
victory against fascism abroad and racism at home. Their courageous
efforts laid the basis for the postwar struggle over the very meaning of
American democracy, a meaning that inescapably hinged on the issue of
race. For Baker and many of her closest allies, the struggle had another
layer as well. By the 1940s, Baker was convinced that how one fought
was as important as what one was fighting for; the key to change lay in
the process of movement building. Therefore she lobbied to make the
structure and practices of the NAACP more inclusive and egalitarian and
to infuse a greater spirit of activism and militancy into its local
campaigns as a strategy for grassroots empowerment. During her years
with the NAACP, Baker honed her skills as a rank-and-file organizer and
began to explore ways of implementing her evolving ideas about
democratic mass action.
Throughout her nearly six-year tenure with the NAACP's national staff,
first as a field secretary and then as the national director of branches,
Baker traveled into the bowels of the American South, suffering the
insults of Jim Crow segregation and often putting her own life in danger
in order to support local antidiscrimination campaigns and recruit new
members to the association. Although antiracist whites still served on the
NAACP's board of directors and belonged to branches in some northern
cities, the strict segregation that pervaded every aspect of life in the
South meant that local branches were composed almost entirely of
African Americans. In many southern cities and small towns, the NAACP
was the only black freedom organization on the scene, and joining it was
a militant gesture. In doing field work for the NAACP, then, Baker was
organizing black people to confront white supremacy. This was a
physically grueling and emotionally stressful job, and Baker was only
able to do it because of the support she received from a network of close
friends and colleagues, most of whom were women.
In the NAACP, as in other political organizations, women were
indispensable but underappreciated. The association had never elected a
woman as its executive secretary, and women were often excluded from
the informal inner circle of decision makers.2 On the other hand, women
formed the backbone of many of the most active local branches, as well
as of the national office staff itself. Women's contributions had to be
acknowledged, even if they did not translate into formal positions of
power. Both field secretaries and local branch leaders had a certain
amount of autonomy, and—despite the national leadership's
preoccupation with control—the day-to-day organizing work they did in
the field was crucial to the association's success. In the final analysis, the
NAACP provided an opportunity for women like Ella Baker to wield
considerable influence at the local level and to a lesser extent nationally.
At times, Baker had to defend her authority and her autonomy, but the
respect she earned from her co-workers and from local activists and the
skills she brought to her assigned tasks meant that even those who
disliked her outspoken and assertive style had to put up with it, at least
for a while.
FIELD WORK FOR THE NAACP
Founded in 1909-10 by the prominent scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois
as an interracial organization committed to achieving racial equality, the
experienced considerable growth and success over its first thirty
years. Fighting its battles largely in the legal arena, the NAACP won a
number of key victories, recruited a cadre of bright and talented young
black activists and lawyers to its staff, and earned a reputation as the
preeminent black rights organization of the day.
NAACP
Emerging out of the all-black Niagara Movement, the NAACP was as
much a challenge to the conservative political tendencies among African
American leaders as it was a response to the unabashed racism and
vigilante violence of white society. In 1909, Booker T. Washington was
the reigning patriarch of black American politics. Although a radical
black tradition had existed through slavery, Reconstruction, and beyond,
Washington's accommodationist stance, which advocated self-help
instead of protest, set the tone for the era. The NAACP's demand for racial
equality seemed radical in comparison to Washington's politics,
especially in the hostile climate of the early twentieth century. In the
beginning the association's leadership, embodied in its board of directors,
was predominately white and middle class, and its rank-and-file
membership was relatively small. After a series of legal victories
regarding voting rights in the 1910s and 1920s, including a 1915
Supreme Court decision that struck down the discriminatory grandfather
clause and another in 1927 that outlawed the all-white primary, the
organization grew considerably in prominence and visibility. In 1920, the
Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson, who was an
associate of Ella Baker's during the 1930s, became the first black to head
the organization. He was succeeded by the controversial and flamboyant
Walter White, who took over as the second black executive secretary in
1930.3
The NAACP came of age during the Great Depression and World War
II. Its aggressive attack on lynching and other forms of racial violence,
its fight against discrimination in the armed forces and war industries,
and finally its campaign against inequality in public education put the
organization on the national map. There were internal changes as well.
By the onset of the depression, the NAACP's leadership had an increasing
black presence, and the organization enjoyed tremendous growth. Over
the course of Baker's years with the association's national office, from
1940 to 1946, its membership mushroomed from 50,000 in 1940 to
almost 450,000 by 1945.4 The NAACP became a nationwide organization
with a significant presence in southern small towns as well as in northern
cities. Baker worked for the association at a pivotal moment in its
development as a leading force within the black freedom movement.
The NAACP's growth was promoted by its active national staff. By the
1940s, this cadre of educated young, predominately black professionals
were increasingly influencing the association's programs and policies. As
the group expanded, internal debates and struggles over its politics and
policies became more frequent. One of the palpable tensions Baker
observed was generational as well as political, foreshadowing some of
the political differences that later manifested themselves in the Civil
Rights Movement of the 1960s. At the time Baker was hired, she later
recalled, the NAACP had entered “a period when there were young people
who were joining the staff and who were demanding certain kinds of
opening up, which meant primarily going down and working with
people, not just having a great big mass meeting and collecting the
membership.”5 They were challenging what they perceived to be the
more moderate and elitist practices of their elders.6
The push to widen the organization's base was linked to an ongoing
effort to expand its agenda. During the depression, economic issues came
to the fore in the NAACP, as was true in other African American
organizations. The clamor for change peaked in 1933 at a conference
held in Amenia, New York, at the estate of Joel Spingarn, a longtime
white backer of the NAACP. The gathering included young radical black
intellectuals, such as E. Franklin Frazier, Ralph Bunche, and Abram
Harris, who demanded that the group become more oriented toward mass
action and more focused on labor and economic issues. While their
specific proposals for change were rejected by the national leadership,
many staff members still hoped to push the organization in that general
direction. Some of these young activists became Ella Baker's allies and
role models during the 1940s, as the association continued to grapple
with questions about what kind of organization it should be and what
work should be given priority.
Black politics at that time, perhaps even more so than today, were
dominated by personalities, a fact that Ella Baker spent a great deal of
her life trying to change. The two personalities who dominated the
NAACP during the 1930s and 1940s were W. E. B. Du Bois, founder and
editor of the association's monthly magazine, the Crisis, and Walter
White, its executive secretary. Du Bois was a Harvard-trained scholar
who had studied in Berlin and published works of history, sociology,
political analysis, and autobiography. By the 1940s he had an
international reputation as an outspoken opponent of American racism
and of colonialism worldwide, and he was a leading advocate of PanAfricanism, a philosophy that called for the decolonization and
unification of Africa.7 Walter White also was an author and longtime
civil rights crusader, but he was never as erudite or politically
sophisticated as Du Bois. Their relationship was permeated by
competition and conflict. White had a great sense of his own importance,
which he liked to flaunt. His egotism offended many black people,
especially those who believed that his arrogance stemmed from
misplaced pride in his striking physical features: he was blonde, blueeyed, and very light complected. But White's commitment to the struggle
for racial justice was as clear as his own racial appearance was
ambiguous.
Personal tensions and political differences put Du Bois and White on
a collision course. According to his supporters, Du Bois, who had no
pintsized ego himself, was engaged in a push to democratize the
association during the 1930s and 1940s, seeking to open up decision
making and conduct more mass campaigns. White, on the other hand,
felt that Du Bois was using the Crisis to put forth his own political
views, some of which were at variance with the official policies of the
NAACP. Most notably, Du Bois clashed with White and others on the
board over his support for all-black economic initiatives during the
1930s, a position they felt undermined the association's commitment to
full integration. To some, however, the conflict between the two men was
largely a clash of egos and personalities. Neither man won a decisive
victory. Du Bois initially resigned from the NAACP in 1935, but he
continued to enjoy strong support and returned to the national office in
1944. White finally fired him in 1948. Ironically, it was the ousted Du
Bois who left the more enduring legacy, as others carried on the
principles he had articulated.
Ella Baker respected Du Bois, shared many of his left-wing
sentiments, and felt that the NAACP could “use his many and varied
talents.” Yet she was not comfortable with either White's or Du Bois's
leadership style. She described Du Bois as aloof and both men as having
a great sense of ego and self-importance.8 Neither of them was the kind
of organizer Baker modeled herself after; such high-profile, public
figures did not draw her to the association and keep her there. It was the
brave and unheralded local people scattered in NAACP branches
throughout the country, along with her few close friends in the New York
office, who earned Baker's respect, loyalty, and perseverance.
An interesting and eclectic supporting cast of characters staffed the
NAACP offices in New York during the 1940s, ranging from sophisticated
and articulate young lawyers to quiet but tireless secretaries and office
workers. Although the most visible NAACP leaders during the 1940s were
male, a number of tough, creative, and hard-working women were
indispensable to the daily operations of the New York office and the
grassroots field organizing that sustained it. W. E. B. Du Bois's future
wife, Shirley Graham, was one of them. Graham, a novelist, playwright
and left-leaning activist who worked briefly for the NAACP as a field
organizer in 1943, expressed enormous respect for Baker as a
democratizing force within the organization. Five years after her own
departure from the staff, Graham, by then married to Du Bois, wrote a
scathing letter protesting her husband's ouster and linking his criticisms
about the lack of democratic accountability with the grievances that
Baker had expressed at the time of her own resignation in 1946.9 Other
women that Baker respected and worked closely with included Lucille
Black, Charlotte Crump, Ruby Hurley, and Daisy Lampkin, all of whom
she relied on for sisterly support.
Baker was one of four field secretaries when she joined the staff in
1940. Daisy Lampkin, the eldest and most experienced of the group,
immediately took Ella under her wing. The job of field secretary required
long hours, hard work, and extensive travel. The field secretaries were
the direct links between the NAACP national leadership and the
association's rank-and-file members. Field workers traveled several
months out of the year assisting branch leaders in setting up and
conducting membership and fundraising drives. Those who were so
inclined also helped branches to pursue local campaigns on issues they
regarded as important. Field secretaries were the front-line troops whom
Madison Jones, a national staff member, once jokingly called the “field
hands” of the organization, underscoring the distinction between those
who did tough, direct organizing and those who worked from their desks
in the New York office.
As a part of her orientation as a new field secretary, Baker was asked
to accompany Lampkin on a visit to the Washington, D.C., branch,
which was holding its annual membership drive. Walter White hoped
that Baker would “be able to observe Daisy's techniques in putting over a
campaign.”10 Baker admired Lampkin's savvy as an organizer, although
in many respects the two women were quite different. Lampkin was
nearly twenty years Baker's senior, with a decade of service at the NAACP
and long experience in African American women's politics. Lampkin had
been an advocate of woman suffrage, had lobbied for the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment, and was active in both the National Association
of Colored Women and the National Council of Negro Women, two
prominent black women's organizations. She was also vice president of
the African American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier and a close
associate of Robert Vann, the paper's publisher, who had supported Ella
Baker's efforts in the cooperative movement during the 1930s. Lampkin
was a legendary organizer of NAACP branches and served as something of
a role model for Baker when she was first hired.11
Baker was grateful to get the job with the NAACP and eager to prove
herself. Branch officials in Washington, D.C., were quite impressed by
her performance. Herbert Marshall, the branch president, wrote to Walter
White commending Baker's skills and insights as an organizer: “I predict
for her a very brilliant future as a member of our NAACP family.”12 In
September 1941, her colleague E. Frederic Morrow, who later served in
the Eisenhower White House, concluded that Baker's “success in the past
few months with the Association has been phenomenal.”13
In March 1941, Ella Baker began traveling on her own. Her first stop
was Birmingham, Alabama, where she launched a major membership
drive.14 Many new organizers would have been intimidated by the
prospect of venturing, all alone, into so notorious a place. By the 1940s,
Birmingham already had a formidable reputation for racism and
repression. Anne Braden, who spent part of her childhood in Alabama,
commented that “Birmingham was so bad that race and union organizers
were snatched off the streets and beaten nearly half to death in the
1930's, and racist police chief Bull Connor was doing his dirty work in
the 40's as well,” meaning that he was openly encouraging antiblack
violence.15 Martin Luther King Jr. once described Birmingham as the
“most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”16 After a
systematic campaign by Alabama's white elites to suppress civil rights
organizing, the NAACP was banned from the state in 1956.17 Birmingham
remained a pivotal site of civil rights struggles for the next two decades.
In this dismal climate of repression and racial violence, Baker met
some tough and courageous people. She viewed the branch president,
Rev. J. W. Goodgame Jr., as a “doer,” and she described local activists,
particularly Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Green, as “people who endeared
themselves to me to an unusual degree.”18 The friendships forged
through her work in Birmingham made it, ironically, one of Baker's
favorite cities. Despite its virulent racism and vigilante violence, she
once described it as “one of the places in the South where I felt at ease.”
Whenever she took time out for a few days of leisure during her
extended travels, she stopped in Birmingham. Baker liked “shopping in
the big department stores there”—probably buying hats, which was one
of her few and favorite indulgences.19 She loved hats. Perhaps it was a
quick way for someone as busy as she was to add a little pizzazz to her
outfit without much fuss. She had a sense of style but never much time
or patience for makeup, fancy hairdos, and the like. Her hats were her
fashion statement, and she was very upset when on at least two occasions
during her travels in the 1940s her hatboxes were left behind on trains.
She dispatched letters to just about everyone concerned to locate the
prized possessions, which eventually she did.20
In the spring of 1941, during the Birmingham campaign, Baker went
to great lengths to drum up support for the NAACP. Working with Rev.
Good-game, she frequented neighborhood gathering places to try to
reach the common folk. On one particular day, they “spent the morning
visiting barber shops, filling stations, grocery stores and housewives,
getting people to work.”21 Baker was not above resorting to material
incentives to motivate people to recruit new members for the NAACP. She
was pleased to report that “with the announcement of cash prizes, we
have been able to get the pastors of most of the leading churches to agree
to act as captains and accept 100 members as their quota.”22 The
membership drive was a resounding success. During a stay of nearly two
weeks, Baker helped enlist dozens of new members and raised thousands
of dollars for the NAACP.
Baker wanted to build as large a base for the NAACP as she could. She
conveyed to Assistant Secretary Roy Wilkins her ideas for “increasing
the Crisis circulation and bolstering my campaign efforts [by visiting]
some of the pool-rooms, boot black parlors, bars and grilles,” with the
aim of “having a Crisis made available to regular patrons of the
business.”23 These forays into traditionally male domains—obvious
gender transgressions— exemplify Baker's habit of pushing the
boundaries of acceptable behavior for a respectable, middle-class,
married woman during the 1940s. In her letter to Wilkins, she described
this activity as the result of her strong “desire to place the NAACP and its
program on the lips of all the people … the uncouth MASSES included.”24
Baker used this expression sarcastically: in her thinking, the masses were
not “uncouth”; rather, they were central to her political vision for change.
Her style of organizing always focused on how she could make a
campaign, an issue, or an organization have greater appeal to the mass of
ordinary people.
Baker had a way of appealing to ordinary people by making herself
accessible, speaking in a familiar language that people could readily
understand, and interacting with them in a way that made them feel they
were important to her. She nurtured and cultivated this unassuming
manner. Baker recognized that aspects of her background—her class
privilege, higher education, residence in New York City, and close
contact with prominent national leaders—made her different from many
of the uneducated folk she worked with in the South. Nevertheless, she
did not want those differences to overshadow their commonalities. Baker
was fond of telling a story about a woman who said to her after a
meeting in some small southern town that the two of them were wearing
the same dress. Such an encounter would be a society woman's
nightmare, but Ella Baker delighted in it: “I've had women come up to
me and say, ‘Your dress is just like mine.’ And that's an identification.
See, they don't know how to deal with the verbal part, but they are
identifying with you. And instead of you turning up your nose to turn
them off, you can say something that shows that that's good. We've both
got good dresses.”25 Baker interacted with the woman in a way she
thought would make the woman feel most comfortable. She did not view
the comment as petty; rather, she tried to read between the lines to
understand why the woman had approached her. The woman's comment
about the piece of clothing they had in common suggested that the
woman had also identified with what Baker had said in her speech,
although the woman was uncertain about how to express it. Other NAACP
leaders had come to town in the past wearing expensive clothing. Baker
approached people in a different manner. “They didn't have to worry
about me wearing any minks,” Baker joked later; “I didn't own any—
didn't want any.”26 Her remarks underscore the point that she was
straightforward and unpretentious. This down-to-earth quality enabled
her to rapidly develop a rapport with people, especially poor and
working-class people.
This story gives us insight into Baker's personal organizing style. In
an interview many years later, Baker described how she approached her
NAACP work in the South. Over the years, she had arrived at the
conclusion that political participation was not mainly about highpowered leaders like White or Du Bois but rather about the ways in
which ordinary people could transform themselves and their
communities. This process was both profoundly political and deeply
human. She explained it this way:
There're some people in my experience, especially “the little
people” as some might call them, who never could explain the
NAACP as such. But they had the knack of getting money from John
Jones or somebody. They might walk up to him: “Gimme a dollar
for the NAACP.” And maybe because of what they had done in
relationship to John Jones, he'd give the dollar. They could never
tell anybody what the program of the Association was. So, what do
you do about that. You don't be [sic] demeaning to them. You say,
well here is Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Susie Jones, and remember last year
Sister Susie Jones came in with so much… . Now, somewhere in
the process she may learn some other methods, and she may learn
to articulate some of the program of the Association. But whether
she does or not, she feels it. And she transmits it to those she can
talk to.27
In Baker's political philosophy, personal relationships were the building
blocks that led to solidarity and collective action. Sociologist Belinda
Robnett suggests that emotions are also critical variables in mobilizing
and organizing people for action. It is important that people feel as well
as think about what they are involved in.
The process of individual politicization described by Baker resembles
the theories developed by feminist social scientists and historians such as
Karen Brodkin Sacks, Chana Kai Lee, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and
Temma Kaplan, who, like Robnett, argue that women's social
relationships are critical resources in community-based political
mobilization. For example, Sacks's study of a hospital workers'
unionization drive focuses on the web of personal and political
relationships sustained largely by women workers, whom she terms
“centerwomen.” She concludes that “political activism is embedded in,
and flowers from, everyday inter-personal and social experiences.”28 Ella
Baker armed herself with this understanding as she marched across the
South doing battle with Jim Crow racism in the fall of 1941, and as she
battled to change the organizational culture of the New York office.
Baker's next campaign, in Virginia, was almost derailed even before it
began. Here she had to prove herself not only as a new organizer but also
as a woman capable of doing what others perceived as a man's job. She
agreed at the last minute to conduct Virginia's annual membership
campaign because her colleague Fred Morrow was unable to go as
scheduled.29 A few days before her arrival, John M. Tinsley, the
Richmond branch president and state chairman, dispatched a letter to
Walter White containing the following message:
Our branches in Virginia need guidance, organization, information,
and inspiration. But we feel it will be too much of a hardship upon
any woman to undertake to do this. In many communities the only
time at which a meeting can be held when a large number of
people will be free to attend is late at night or on certain Sundays.
In some parts of the state personal accommodations will be
comfortable, but we cannot say that for every locality. For all of
these reasons we recommend a young man who can easily adjust
himself to all of these conditions to cover Virginia.30
By the time Tinsley's letter reached Walter White's desk, it was too late
to intercept Baker and send a man instead. But it is unlikely that White
would have tried to make this kind of substitution, and it is even more
unlikely that Baker would have accepted such a change without a fight.
She showed up on Tinsley's doorstep a few days later, unaware that he
preferred a man.
Tinsley was a dentist, and he and his wife Ruth had long been active
in the Richmond branch. He was one of those black professionals who,
as Baker put it, “had an income separate and apart from the
establishment.”31 Many of his patients were his fellow NAACP members,
so he had a bit more economic insulation than those whose employers
were white segregationists. Some southern NAACP leaders, like other civil
rights activists, relied on their relative economic independence to protect
them from reprisals. A small, thin man whom Baker described as
“tiny”—not much bigger than herself—Tinsley was a fighter and a good
organizer.32 Over the course of her eleven-day stay, the two worked side
by side. By the time she left Richmond, Tinsley was an enthusiastic Ella
Baker fan. His sexist assumptions about a woman's limited capabilities
had been shattered. In his follow-up letter to White, Tinsley described
Baker in glowing terms: “One of the most important and wonderful
things that has happened to Richmond was the presence of the national
field worker, Miss Ella J. Baker… . Never during her stay in Richmond
did she slacken the pace. She was going from the time of her arrival until
the time she left… . She has demonstrated to the people of Richmond
and over the State of Virginia one characteristic very few people have
and that is the wonderful and outstanding quality of mixing with any
group of people and trying to help solve their problem[s].”33 One of the
lessons Baker took away from these early experiences was the
importance of patience and process. People without confidence to
express themselves could grow into that confidence if given the time and
space to do so, and people skeptical of women's leadership could be won
over, occasionally even without major confrontations.
Richmond was one of the NAACP's largest branches. During the
membership drive, Baker met with virtually all of the major black
organizations in town, including the city's Baptist Ministers Conference,
the Independent Order of St. Luke, the North Carolina Mutual Life
Insurance Company, and students and faculty at Virginia Union
University. Through Baker's efforts, the chapter raised over $1,000 and
recruited more than 1,500 new members in less than two weeks.34 But
Baker was not satisfied. She observed that “as successful as the
Richmond campaign was … there were many more people who could
have joined the NAACP had there been sufficient campaign workers to
contact them.”35 Perhaps she was thinking of the “uncouth masses”—the
poor, illiterate, or semiliterate people who were sometimes given low
priority in membership drives. She was equally concerned about the lack
of involvement in branch activities. Richmond had an impressive
membership roster, but most members were not in the habit of actually
participating in the work of the organization. Baker found this problem
in a number of the NAACP's larger branches. Her goal was to get more
people actively engaged in local campaigns, confronting local elites,
talking to one another in meetings, and feeling a greater sense of
ownership of the organization. Popular participation was the first step in
making the association a more democratic and mass-based organization.
The NAACP had to belong to the masses, and they had to claim it as their
own, she insisted.36
After leaving Richmond, Baker ventured into the more rural parts of
the state where Tinsley feared conditions would be too difficult for her,
visiting such places as Danville, Nottaway County, Farmville, and
Martinsville. Although the smaller towns had many fewer members than
the Richmond branch, she gave serious thought and attention to the
particular circumstances in each locale, and she welcomed the
opportunity “to work in areas and with branches that are in need of
intensive organizational efforts.”37 Baker found her efforts in these
communities both challenging and rewarding. Tinsley accompanied her
on some of the trips that did not require an overnight stay. “He had a big
car. And he was a bad driver,” Baker, who herself never learned to drive,
recalled, “but I rode with anybody.”38 This tour cemented the friendship
between the dentist and the activist. One Christmas, the Tinsleys sent
Baker a Virginia ham as a gesture of their affection, one that she deeply
appreciated.39 The kind of relationships Baker created during her tenure
with the NAACP were not just business or professional relationships; they
were profoundly personal ones.
In her work with NAACP branches, Baker went well beyond the
national leadership's preoccupation with collecting membership dues to
fund the legal department's litigation against discrimination. Like the
other members of the younger cohort on the national staff, she wanted to
see members engage actively in local struggles. In Baker's view, the field
organizer had to forge friendships, earn the trust and confidence of
members at the branch level, and mobilize people on the basis of the
relationships that held communities together. Baker recognized that
familial and personal relationships were the foundation of any sustained
local organizing campaign and that it was the job of any outside
organizer to identify and build on that foundation. In order to further this
aim, Baker stayed in the South for longer periods of time. Although she
complained that her visits to most branches were not nearly long enough,
she stayed longer than her predecessors had. Previously, according to
Baker, “the pattern” was for “a well-known person [to] come in and
speak at a meeting and leave the next day.”40 Baker would stay in one
place for up to two weeks and make extended tours through the region.
She generally left New York in September and did not return until
November, and she went out “into the field” again for a month or two in
the spring. These extended visits allowed her to get to know local
activists, to build greater rapport with them, and to become familiar with
the issues and problems that concerned them most. The lengthy absences
from home did little for her marriage, but the local NAACP branch work
benefited from her sacrifice.
Baker contended that field secretaries had to know the issues and
culture of each locale in order to organize a campaign. It was only
through this type of attention to detail that serious programs of action
could be developed, and Baker understood this better than anyone. In
Danville, she noted that the principal issues were “police brutality and
getting Negroes to qualify and vote.” In Farmville, “qualifying voters,
teachers' salaries and school busses [were] the immediate concerns of the
branch.” And in Nottaway, “voting seem[ed] to strike the most
responsive chord.”41 Baker's hard work and enthusiasm in both the
Alabama and Virginia campaigns were applauded by the people she met
and commended by her superiors in the NAACP hierarchy. During her first
few months as an NAACP field secretary, she made an impressive debut.
In the fall of 1941 Baker undertook another series of membership
drives for the association, reporting that “with the exception of two days
in October and two days in November, the period from September 6th to
November 25th was spent in the field.” She delivered some sixty-three
speeches in seven cities.42 It was an exhausting itinerary. Baker was
anxious to do more outreach and to explore ways of more actively
engaging members in practical work. She was optimistic that “the
masses of Negroes [were] ready for the program of the Association,” and
she was determined to bring it to them.43 Ella chided her colleagues to be
more creative and aggressive in their outreach efforts: “We must have the
‘nerve’ to take the Association to people wherever they are. As a case in
point, the mass-supported beer gardens, night clubs etc., in Baltimore
were invaded on a small scale during the membership campaign there.
And with considerable success… . We went in, addressed the crowds and
secured memberships and campaign workers. With the results that are
well summed up in a comment overheard in one club, ‘you certainly
have some nerve coming in here, talking , but I'm going to join that
doggone organization.’”44
Despite her enthusiasm about her work, Baker's job was not an easy
one. While on the road she worked every day almost to the point of
collapse. In October 1941, she complained she was in the NAACP office in
Baltimore as late as 9:30 at night “after weeks of nothing but work.”45
She often doubted whether the time and energy she invested was actually
paying off in results. In another letter to Walter White, Baker lamented:
“I must leave now for one of those small church meetings which are
usually more exhausting than the immediate returns seem to warrant but
it's a part of the spade work, so let it be.”46 Travel was difficult, office
space and supplies were limited, and the frenzied pace was often taxing
on her health and spirits. But Baker was on a mission and therefore
comfortable accommodations were a secondary consideration. She
admitted that she would sleep almost anywhere and eat almost anything.
Traveling mostly by train, she would typically leave one town on Sunday
morning after a weeklong visit, only to have another series of meetings
with local officials on her arrival in the next town, followed by speeches
at up to five churches on a given Sunday afternoon.47 The seemingly
boundless enthusiasm Baker had brought with her to the job was finally
being tested by the grueling work regimen that was demanded of her.
FRIENDSHIP AND FRICTION IN THE
NAACP FAMILY
Although Ella Baker occasionally vented to Walter White about the
frustrations of organizing in the field, she never got much sympathy.
White was more obsessed with his own image and ego to bother with
such matters. “He was very much in love with himself,” Baker once
snipped.48 A travel itinerary as hectic as Baker's did not leave much time
for family life. But Ella rarely mentioned Bob in her correspondence
with friends and co-workers. Roberts was also on the road much of the
time during this period, trying to make a go of his refrigeration business.
He suffered several illnesses, and during the late 1940s he spent time
receiving medical care in North Carolina.49 Baker interrupted her travel
itinerary at least two times to check on him.
One of the most nurturing and supportive relationships Baker formed
while working at the NAACP was with Lucille Black, the national
membership secretary. Black began working for the association in the
early 1940s and continued her affiliation more than thirty years. A
superficial look at Lucille Black's career might give the impression that
she was a loyal, hardworking staff member, but otherwise not terribly
interesting. Such a characterization would not do her justice. Lucille was
an intellectual, a voracious reader, and a bit of an eccentric. She was
lively, colorful, and a savvy political organizer. Apparently, she was also
quite attractive. One former lover described her as “a tall voluptuous
brown-skinned woman,” with a sharp wit and a deep commitment to
social justice. Lucille loved jazz and bourbon, hated cooking, read
Kafka, and chose never to marry, despite having been asked repeatedly.50
She was Ella Baker's dear friend and confidante for many years. The two
women enjoyed long phone conversations, meals together, and
occasionally evenings out. Their relationship was anchored in politics, a
sisterhood steeped in struggle. “Lucille was probably Ella's closest friend
in the office,” an NAACP staffer observed.51
Baker let her guard down with Black, complaining about her
problems and confessing her doubts and insecurities. While traveling
alone, Baker would routinely sit down at the end of a busy day and write
Lucille a rambling, cathartic, and often witty rendition of the day's
events. In one letter Ella complained to Lucille: “Today, I am worn to a
frazzle. Train connections are not so good … [and the situation] leaves
me quite frayed.”52 In another letter to Black, she confessed: “The
outlook for this trip does not appear rosy. I am constantly challenged to
‘pass a miracle’ which will demonstrate how small, isolated, and rural
communities can initiate active branches in the absence of some major
tragedy… . The best I can do is try to jolt or scare them into action, and
make an effort to maintain it through correspondence long enough to
bring the branch membership up to at least fifty members. But such are
the trials of those who must act as Mother Confessor to the Little Folk.
So let it be.”53 These letters were an important outlet for Baker to
express her frustrations and disappointments as she undertook the
difficult work of grassroots organizing in the South.
Baker's letters to Black eloquently express her analysis of the class
politics within the organization and the black community and clearly
articulate her own egalitarian sensibilities. Ella had great distaste for the
petit-bourgeois lifestyles and snobbery displayed by some of the local
branch leaders. She felt that their elitism and pompous attention to
social, rather than political, events were obstacles to more militant mass
action. Even in the stifling atmosphere of the Jim Crow South, especially
in the cities, black professionals and entrepreneurs had carved out a
niche within the confining walls of the racial order. Within those
confines, there was an ever-present struggle over issues of resistance and
accommodation.
The letters to Black complained about the middle-class socialites who
had a stranglehold on some local branches. She did not hide her
contempt for the pettiness she encountered in these circles. She wrote to
Lucille about a visit she was compelled to make in Georgia: “I am
stopping at the home of three women of leisure whose major past
time[sic] is idle chatter … [and] who were too busy to attend the meeting
last night.”54 From Florida, Ella wrote: “The campaign chairman is
experiencing a slight let down in that I am not a social elite, and cannot
join her in a game of bridge or golf at the ‘Country Club.’”55
Baker felt that the class hierarchy within the black community was a
major obstacle to creating more active and effective branches that would
be able to reach out to every sector of the African American community.
In Baker's opinion, some of the middle-class black professionals who ran
local branches “had attitudes that were not particularly helpful in terms
of change. For instance, … they would be against the idea of going to
battle for the town drunk who happened to have been brutalized when
being arrested, because who was he?”56 Baker referred to this
hypothetical scenario of police brutality toward the town drunk
repeatedly, and it reveals her fundamental criticism of the vision of
change embodied by the black elite. In essence, some middle-class black
leaders felt that only those blacks who conformed to the dominant
culture's notion of social respectability should be held up as deserving of
civil rights and full citizenship. This was not always the position they
articulated publicly, but it was implicit in their actions. Baker felt that
this viewpoint had to be rooted out and challenged, first, as a matter of
principle and, second, in order to mobilize the support and participation
of poor and working-class members of the black community who were,
after all, the overwhelming majority.57
Another source of personal support in her dealings with others was
Baker's friendship with Charlotte Crump, a young woman who worked
as the NAACP's coordinator of publicity and promotions in the early
1940s. Crump was friendly, easygoing, and perhaps a little lonely, since
her husband was stationed elsewhere with the military. She and Baker
often went out to lunch or dinner together at a nearby restaurant called
the Starlight, where they would relax and, as Crump described it, “gripe
about this or that.”58 One of Crump's main gripes concerned her run-ins
with her male supervisors, White and Wilkins. Despite the fact that she
worked weekends, holidays, and some evenings, both White and Wilkins
complained that she did not work hard enough and threatened to have her
punch a time clock to ensure that she was in the office by 9:30 every
morning.59 In 1945, when Baker was no longer in White's good graces,
very similar complaints would be lodged against her as well. At this
point, however, Baker served as a sounding board for her friend
Charlotte.
Much of the correspondence between Baker and Crump was businessrelated, since Crump coordinated the publicity for Baker's visits to
various branches. However, their exchanges always had a personal tone.
Crump signed her letters “affectionately” or “faithfully” and jokingly
chastised Ella to “get a little rest because we don't want to have to carry
you into Fifth on a stretcher when you return.”60 Crump's concern and
affection for Baker are apparent in these details. Baker was known for
overworking and pushing herself to the limit. Friends and colleagues like
Crump constantly reminded her to take it easy and take better care of
herself, although she rarely took their advice.61
The NAACP women seemed to look out for one another. They knew the
difficulties of navigating the internal dynamics of the organization as
well as the dangers and inconveniences associated with being on the
road. Many of their letters back and forth are punctuated with
admonitions to “take care of yourself” and “don't let [it] get you
down.”62 Baker took a special interest in the hardships that her friend
Ruby Hurley experienced while traveling on NAACP business in Norfolk
in 1943, soon after Baker had assumed the post of director of branches.
She made suggestions about how Hurley might arrange more
comfortable accommodations during her stay and then assured her that
she would try to attend a meeting on youth in Harlem in the wake of the
1943 “riot” in order to convey some of Ruby's concerns, which are not
specified in the letter. Given the demands on Baker's schedule this was a
generous gesture, and she concluded the letter jokingly, “now ain't I a
friend.”63 Both Hurley and Baker also stayed in touch with their mutual
friend, Pauli Murray, who also remained very much involved in NAACP
activities. Pauli wrote to Ruby when she was considering law school.
When Ruby wrote back to encourage her, she updated her on how hard
Ella was working and concluded, “in the meantime, good luck from both
of us.”64
Not all of Baker's relationships in the NAACP were so amicable, and
not all of her female colleagues were sisterly. She made friends and
enemies alike. Her first major conflict within the NAACP “family” was
with the formidable Lillie Jackson, an unapologetic socialite who headed
the Baltimore branch.65 Baker made no secret of her disdain for the
pretenses and self-aggrandizing behavior of those who were overly
concerned with status and appearance. These sensibilities immediately
put her on a collision course with Jackson.
The two women are a study in opposites. Jackson basked in the
spotlight and insisted on deference from those around her. Although she
came from humble origins, she went to great lengths to demonstrate the
wealth she and her family had acquired and their rank as one of
Baltimore's most prominent black families. Baker, on the other hand, was
self-assured but modest. She dressed plainly and spoke with a simple
elegance that endeared her to educated and uneducated audiences alike.
Jackson's identity was very much that of a respectable, married woman.
Baker was an ambiguously married woman, if in fact her marital status
was known, and she flirted with the limits of respectability with her
aggressive organizing style. No one would accuse Lillie Jackson of being
an appendage of her husband or anyone else, but she did harbor some
very conventional notions about marriage and the proper role of married
women. Her status as Mrs. Jackson was important to her, a value she
passed on to her daughter, Juanita, who, in her own words, “resigned
[her post with the NAACP] to marry my prince.”66 Baker saw herself as a
fiercely independent woman and defied the conventions that restricted
the activities of married women simply by ignoring them.
Personalities, class biases, and divergent gender identities all
contributed to the problems between Baker and Jackson, which
developed in September 1941, when Baker went to Baltimore to help
conduct the annual membership drive. There had already been conflict
between the national office and the branch leadership before she arrived.
Baltimore had requested a paid secretary to help handle branch business;
the national officers apparently felt no such position was needed; and the
branch leaders had threatened to withhold dues and hire someone
themselves.67 Other national staff members had complaints about Lillie
Jackson as well. When field secretaries visited Baltimore, Jackson
treated them as a part of her personal staff. She was accustomed to
planning their schedules and mediating their contacts with other branch
members. One staff member recalled that Jackson would have
“scheduled our trips to the bathroom, if she could have.”68
Even though Baker was still new to the association, she had no
intention of catering to the whims of the branch president. Baker went
around Jackson to meet directly with rank-and-file members, including
those with grievances about how the branch was being run. Jackson
viewed this as a direct affront to her leadership. The very day that Ella
Baker left Baltimore for another campaign in Norfolk, Lillie Jackson
dispatched a letter to Walter White harshly criticizing Baker and alleging
incompetence and a “bad attitude” on her part. Baker's “attitude has been
discourteous and contemptible, and is not conducive to the best interests
of all concerned.” Jackson accused Baker of trying to disrupt the
Baltimore branch by fomenting dissension and of being “antagonistic”
and uncooperative.69 Jackson took the view that “there are always a few
disgruntled people in every organization. Certainly campaign directors
should not encourage dissension and confusion in a branch. That,
however, is precisely what Miss Baker has done.”70 Baker disapproved
of Jackson, and she said so in her reports to her supervisors in the
national office. In her view, Jackson dominated the Baltimore group in
such a way as to stifle its growth and to engender bad feelings among
potential new members.71 What Jackson described as Baker's “bad
attitude” was probably reflective of her negative view of the way in
which the branch was being directed. In Baker's opinion, the branch was
being run by a group of short-sighted, self-serving bureaucrats who were
roadblocks to progress. Although the Baltimore branch boasted nearly
3,000 members, they were members in name only; they had signed up
and paid their dues, but they were asked to do little else. In one of her
monthly field reports, Baker observed: “The need for greater
membership participation in the larger branches was emphasized when in
Baltimore a functioning publicity committee and speaker's bureau were
not obtainable.”72 Baker confided to Roy Wilkins that she thought the
Baltimore branch leaders were petty and arrogant, and they used “almost
blackmail” techniques in persuading others to support the branch
financially. Even more seriously, she accused the Jackson family of
nepotism and favoritism in the exercise of their political power. She
noted specifically that one or another of Lillie Jackson's relatives had
repeatedly “won” trips to the national NAACP conferences, to the
exclusion of other members.73 Even though Jackson's persistent and
vindictive attacks undoubtedly bothered Baker, she was more deeply
troubled by the heavy-handed and undemocratic style of leadership that
Jackson personified. The Baltimore branch had only the appearance of a
strong local organization. The branch leadership had not cultivated a
group of local leaders or developed a serious program for action; instead,
the chapter was run like an exclusive social club.
Fortunately for Baker, both Walter White and Roy Wilkins defended
her against Jackson's criticisms and deflected blame for the conflict away
from Baker and back on the branch leaders themselves. According to
Wilkins, “The Jackson family will find fault with every national officer
who does not conform to their personal ideas. They do not like Mrs.
Lampkin; they spend a lot of time trying to smear me; Morrow has never
been there; and now they are trying to smear Ella. I think a good rule
from now on would be to let them conduct their own campaigns and
probably hoist themselves by their own petard.”74 White expressed
astonishment at the allegations from Baltimore, pointing out to Lillie
Jackson that her complaints about Ella Baker were “at such variance
with the reports from every other branch with which she has worked that
I am convinced that there must be some basic misunderstanding.”75
Although tensions between Baker and Jackson persisted for some years,
this controversy blew over without any apparent damage to Baker's
political career or her reputation within the NAACP. She was promoted to
director of branches less than two years later. But the road Baker traveled
was indeed a difficult and, at times, a dangerous one. In order to do the
work to which she had committed herself, she had to face challenges
more serious than those presented by the likes of Lillie Jackson.
DANGERS ALL AROUND
Although Baker was never arrested or beaten during her NAACP days, it
was certainly not because she traveled in a safe environment. There were
dangers all around her, and she escaped harm only through a
combination of blind luck and constant awareness. When threats were
apparent, Baker maneuvered carefully. Her refusal to always conform to
the conventions of Jim Crow meant she had many close calls. One day in
December, 1942, while she was riding a bus in Georgia, she braced
herself for a confrontation.
I got on a bus [and] … it was crowded and it had a lot of whites on
it, service people, and there was only one other black person and I
could tell that she was one of the ladies who paid payroll. But I
could see that she was not going to be pushed around either. So I
said, “well, we'll see here today” because they [bus drivers] had
the habit of demanding that you get up and let them [white
passengers] sit down. But they didn't do it that day. Because I was
prepared to not get up and I could tell she was not going to be
moved.76
When Baker and her quietly defiant ally did not relinquish their seats,
they were subjected to a litany of verbal abuse. She recalled that she sat
and “listened to two white sailors [standing above her] talking about how
they had killed a black woman.” Baker, understanding the volatility of
the situation, regretted that she “couldn't confront them,” but she wisely
decided not to in this instance.77
Another time, a bus driver refused to let Baker and other blacks board
a bus in Florida because a white sailor was sprawled out on a seat in the
back of the bus designated for “colored” passengers. Baker just stood
there and watched the bus pass by.78 She endured a number of similar
humiliating experiences. Baker was known for being tough and
confrontational if she had to be, but she was also practical. She chose her
battles carefully and assessed what was at stake and the likely outcome
of a fight before she entered into it. Her own survival strategy dictated
that she had to tolerate certain insults and abuses, garner her anger and
her strength, and bring them to bear under more favorable conditions.
However, there were times when she simply could not avoid
confrontation.
For Ella Baker, the fight for social justice waged through the NAACP
became a personal as well as political crusade. She had been told since
she was a young child that she was inferior to no one, and she believed
it. But her confidence routinely rubbed against the reality of Jim Crow
segregation. Baker's struggle against racism was as much about standing
up for herself as it was about lending her strength to struggles initiated
on behalf of others. There were numerous instances over the course of
her life when she personally tested the limits of America's racial policies,
vented her anger, and affirmed her own humanity in the process. One
such instance occurred in the spring of 1943, when she was traveling by
train from Mobile, Alabama, to Jacksonville, Florida.
On May 4, 1943, hungry and tired, Baker entered the dining car of the
train at about 5:45 P.M. to have her supper. Initially, she had no intention
of challenging the company's Jim Crow policy. She entered the diner and
proceeded to take a seat in the section designated for “colored”
passengers. However, four white soldiers were already seated there.
When Ella Baker took a seat near the white soldiers' table, the white
steward nervously ran over to her and insisted that she could not sit there
because it violated state law, which required separate eating facilities for
white and “colored” diners. Baker pointed out to him that she had
complied with state law and sat in the designated section. If he were so
concerned about enforcing segregated eating facilities, he should
“request that the four white soldiers move forward, since there was
ample space in the section reserved for whites.” When the steward
declined to act on Baker's suggestion, she took it upon herself to ask the
soldiers to move, which, much to her surprise, they did. In the waiter's
version of the incident, Baker was “insulting and abusive.” He contended
that white passengers were so outraged at Baker's behavior that they
offered to use physical force to remove her from the diner, but the
steward nobly intervened to avert a confrontation. Baker was eventually
served her dinner at the table she had originally occupied.79
Three weeks later, on the last leg of the same trip, Baker confronted a
very similar situation. This time, perhaps feeling emboldened by her
earlier victory, she stood her ground with even greater resolve, but her
defiance was met with violence. On May 29, while she was heading
home to New York from Jacksonville, she entered the dining car of the
train for a meal at about 1:45 P.M. No curtain was in place to divide the
white and “colored” sections of the diner, as was the custom. She sat
down at a booth near the kitchen, which was usually reserved for
“colored” people, and waited for service. A white steward then
confronted Baker, insisting that she leave the car and come back later
when the white passengers were finished eating. It had been a long and
tiring trip. Her blunt response was that “I was hungry and I preferred
eating then.”80 Baker reminded the steward that, while segregation was
the law in Florida, there were also laws that provided for first-class
passengers to be served at their convenience. The steward was so
flustered and offended by the willful self-confidence of this dignified,
middle-aged Negro woman that he immediately summoned two military
policemen who were also traveling on the train to assist him in removing
her from the diner. Baker had no intention of going peacefully. She
described the rest of the incident as follows:
Two white military police immediately rushed to where I was
sitting, one snatched me up by my arm, bruising my leg in two
places, and told me to “get out of there.” I reminded the M.P. that
he was overstepping his bounds. He disregarded this remark. I then
spoke louder and appealed to the house and said “this man is
overstepping his authority.” This seemed to shock him into
realizing that he was manhandling me without any right to do so.
He freed my arms and he, the other M.P. and the steward rushed
out of the car in search, I presume, of the train conductor. When
they returned, I was leaving the dining room and the M.P. who had
manhandled me was remarking, “but I have no jurisdiction over
her.”81
Baker was so insulted by the treatment she had received that she ate
dinner in her seat that evening instead of going back to the dining car,
and she skipped breakfast altogether on Sunday morning.82 When she
arrived back in New York she immediately filed a complaint with the
railway company. Her friend and colleague Thurgood Marshall, the
future Supreme Court justice, who was then on the NAACP's legal staff,
submitted the complaint on her behalf.83 Baker did not make it easy for
railway workers—or anyone else for that matter—to treat her as a
second-class citizen.
The historic struggle for fair treatment on public transportation was a
particularly powerful and symbolic issue for African American women,
and Baker's actions in 1943 had implications for both race and gender
politics. Ida B. Wells, the famed advocate of black and women's rights,
had thrown down the gauntlet nearly twenty years before Ella Baker's
birth when she sued the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway company for
ejecting her from the “ladies coach” of a passenger train in 1884 in
Tennessee. While Wells was very much a lady, she was black and
therefore not eligible for the courtesies afforded white womanhood.
Instead of the more comfortable “ladies coach,” she was required to ride
with the rough-and-tumble, predominantly male crowd in the smoking
car.84 Wells was not alone in her protest. Many African American
women took similar, though less publicized, stances against demeaning
treatment on public transportation. Over a half century later, Rosa Parks,
Joanne Gibson Robinson, and thousands of African American women in
Montgomery, Alabama, became the decisive force in winning the famed
Montgomery bus boycott, an event cited as the spark that ignited the
postwar Black Freedom Movement. In all of these confrontations, as
black women demanded respectful treatment on public trains and busses,
they struggled to define the parameters of race relations, class
distinctions, and gender identity that manifested themselves in the ebb
and flow of daily life. Ella Baker and other black women who engaged in
similar protests were laying claim to the privileges afforded to their
white counterparts. They were rebelling against social custom by
insisting on being treated as “ladies” in a culture that much more readily
cast them as “mammies” or “aunties.”
In this instance, Baker relied on her knowledge of the law to defend
herself from being “manhandled,” as she put it. Such an assertion
crossed other boundaries as well. Here she was, a black woman speaking
with great clarity and confidence, asserting her rights as a citizen,
invoking the law, and publicly reprimanding white men—soldiers, no
less. In this exchange, Baker not only insisted on courtesies usually
reserved for white women but also spoke in an authoritative language
more associated with white men than with black or white women. Baker
defied society's expectations of who and what a Negro woman ought to
be. Her defiance of the conventions defining black womanhood
permeated her life, extending beyond white racist views to the
expectations that prevailed within her own family and community. Her
wrestling with the white military police on the train who attempted
unsuccessfully to “put her in her place” was paralleled by her wrestling
with the circumscribed role prescribed for her by her family and with the
supportive, sometimes deferential role most of her male colleagues in the
NAACP expected her to play. She was determined to stand up for herself at
the same time that she stood up for her sex, her race, and those at the
bottom of the social and economic hierarchy. This type of willful selfassertion was an act of both personal empowerment and political
intervention.
Assertive actions characterize Baker's years of work with the NAACP.
In standing up for herself, she confronted the contradictions embedded in
dominant assumptions about the proper role of black women of her
generation. On the one hand, they were expected to be engaged in
improving the condition of the race, and many, out of necessity, were
employed outside their homes. These activities located black women,
including respectable middle-class women, in the public arena as social
reformers and as workers. Yet the culture was permeated with the idea
that a woman's primary role was to be a mother and a homemaker. There
was indeed a tension between the celebrated contributions of women like
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary McCleod
Bethune—Baker's activist foremothers—and criticisms of them as
encroaching on leadership roles reserved for black men. Although black
women's activism was encouraged, it was circumscribed by what Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham terms the “politics of respectability,” an attempt to
represent the prevailing model of female propriety and ladylike behavior
while still participating in strategies for racial progress and social reform.
The dangers facing a militant black woman in the Jim Crow South
were undeniable, perhaps incalculable. Baker traveled long stretches
alone, making her a vulnerable target. And she traveled with the label of
NAACPorganizer hanging over her head, which was a red flag to white
vigilantes throughout the South. Ku Klux Klan members were known to
attack people who distributed African American newspapers simply
because the publications advocated black suffrage and desegregation.
When Baker visited a given locale, her presence was announced through
flyers, handbills, and the black press. Headlines blazoned: “Hear This
Dynamic Speaker”; “Look Who is Here—Ella Baker”; “Join Now, This
Is Your Fight Too—Hear Ella Baker.”85 The intervention of militant
“outside agitators” must have enraged the likes of Bull Conner, the racist
sheriff of Birmingham, and other avowed white supremacists. But,
remarkably, Baker was able to ease in and out of southern communities
for six years relatively unscathed.
Not all of her colleagues were so lucky. During the 1940s, Ella Baker
worked closely with Harry T. Moore, a teacher and high school principal
in Mims, Florida. Moore was a steadfast organizer who coordinated the
NAACP branches statewide. He spearheaded a campaign to equalize the
salaries of white and black teachers, and helped organize other black
educators in Florida. Baker and Moore were in regular correspondence
during the mid-forties, and she spent time with him and his family during
her frequent Florida visits on behalf of the department of branches. On
Christmas night in 1951, Moore and his wife Harriet were murdered
when dynamite was thrown under their home.86 Murder was the ultimate
fear of NAACP leaders throughout the South in the postwar period, as
public lynching had been for earlier generations. Lethal violence lurked
just below the surface of southern race politics. Baker understood this
minefield and navigated it with caution.
At the same time that Baker worried about the threat of white
vigilante violence, the federal government worried about the alleged
“danger” that she represented. Throughout the World War II period and
the Cold War years that followed, Baker was under constant surveillance
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and by Military Intelligence.
They monitored her moves, speculated about her motives, and compiled
reams of reconnaissance data on her public activity and her private life.
FBI informants called Baker on the phone to obtain information about her
whereabouts, feigned interest in her politics to get a closer view of her
day-to-day activities, and pumped her friends and associates to amass a
profile of a woman they deemed potentially subversive.87
Most of the FBI agents who spied on Baker from the 1940s through
the 1970s did not know what to make of this middle-aged hell-raiser who
defied categorization. She led an unconventional life, made enormous
sacrifices for the causes and campaigns to which she devoted herself, and
asked for very little material reward or recognition in return. She
maintained an eclectic circle of friends of various ages, races, and
political affiliations, yet she herself never belonged to any one
organization for very long. Reading between the lines of the FBI'S
individual reports on Baker's activities, one can almost hear the agents'
queries, pregnant with all the biased stereotypes the agency held about
dissidents: What is she up to? Who does she work for? What is her
hidden agenda? The agents' own inability to answer such basic questions
led one of them to conclude that Baker was “unstable.”88 It was the very
way that she looked at the world that made her difficult to label. Since
she saw revolution as a process, as a living experiment in creative vision
and collaboration, very little, in her opinion, could be predetermined. No
blueprint could be rigidly adhered to. There was an organic interaction
between the people involved in social change and those opposed; among
different sectors, generations, and regions of the movement; between
what we know and what we dare to dream. Although Baker had a
definite worldview, which she articulated, enacted, and defended, there
was fluidity and flexibility in the positions she took and the alliances she
formed. Even the FBI could not pin her down.
Despite the hectic pace, long hours, and dangers inherent in her job,
Baker loved her work as a field organizer for the NAACP. Perhaps she
even enjoyed certain aspects of the solitary, nomadic lifestyle that the job
afforded her. During long train rides between cities she was alone with
her thoughts, and at those times she must have struggled to make
meaning out of the work she was doing ten to twelve hours a day. How
far had she traveled from her own origins in the South? In some ways
she was a world apart, and in other ways she had come full circle. Over
twenty years after leaving Littleton and abandoning her mother's
missionary zeal, and over a decade after renouncing her own missionary
ambitions in order to pursue a more secular path, here she was with her
little, dusty, tattered suitcase living a missionary's existence: traveling
from one town to another preaching the “Gospel” of racial justice, and at
times attempting, as she herself put it, to “pass a miracle.”89 Baker
admitted, “I was the missionary type—I was on a crusade to save
something.”90 But what was that “something”? And how would she ever
succeed against such enormous odds?
The South could seem comfortable and familiar at times, but at other
times Baker must have felt like a foreign visitor. In the decade and a half
since she left Shaw University in Raleigh, she had become a New
Yorker. She made friends from places most small-town southerners had
never heard of; she related to whites in the bohemian arts and leftist
political communities in ways that would make most black southerners
fear for their lives; and she adopted a secular political language for
discussing right and wrong, which would have made her mother cringe.
One friend from North Carolina told Baker admiringly, “You are a lady
of the world [now],” underscoring the divergent paths the two women's
lives had taken since Ella Baker had left her hometown, while the friend
had remained in North Carolina.91
As worldly and cosmopolitan as Baker had become during her years
in New York, she still maintained close ties to her family in the South.
One of her cousins, Helen Gilchrist, recalled: “Ella would swing through
here with her little typewriter and spend a few days. She loved my
cooking and she'd come over to my house and get a good home-cooked
meal, and then she'd be off again.”92 Baker remained especially close to
her mother. Even though she had rejected the two things her mother
wanted most for her in life, a teaching career and a life in the church, she
still found a way to make Georgianna Ross Baker proud. When Ella
conducted membership drives in North Carolina or Virginia, not only
would she always find time to visit and spend time in Littleton, but she
also would frequently arrange to have her mother attend one of the
public meetings at which she was scheduled to deliver the keynote
address. Even though later in life Ella would question the value of
eloquent oratory as a tool for political mobilization, during her NAACP
campaigns she was known as a powerful public speaker. Having served
as Ella's childhood “speech coach,” Anna Baker must have taken great
satisfaction in the fact that her daughter's oratorical skills were being put
to good use. On at least one occasion, Ella indicated she would “delegate
my mother to represent me” at an NAACP event in Warrenton, North
Carolina.93 Ella had been trained in pronunciation and diction by her
perfectionist and proper mother, but she developed her own speaking
style that was itself quite effective. One of her friends and NAACP coworkers, Odetta Harper Hines, described her speaking style this way:
Baker was “a powerful speaker who talked without notes from her heart
to the hearts of her audience. Very forceful, with a strong voice that
projected even without a microphone. Her speeches weren't full of
statistics, nor were they anecdotal. They were to the point [but still] …
very human and warm.”94
CLASS, GENDER, AND PERSONAL
POLITICS
World War II unsettled the class, gender, and racial order of the United
States, creating a new sense of possibility for women, working people,
and African Americans. Women went into the factories in large numbers,
and civil rights activists forced the government and businesses to open
up defense industry jobs to black men and women. New forms of mass
mobilization developed along with new modes of political action. Ella
Baker followed her own path amid these exciting possibilities, linking
the NAACP's civil rights agenda to the labor movement, pushing for
greater gender equity within the association, and emphasizing the need
for rank-and-file organizing built on preexisting community networks as
a model for the NAACP.
In Baker's view, the struggle against racism was deeply embedded in
an overarching class struggle between the haves and the have-nots.
Influenced by the egalitarian ethos of her childhood community, the
socialist milieu of Harlem in the 1930s, and her close association with
labor union organizers in the Workers Education Project, Baker was
strongly sympathetic to the growing trade union movement, regarding it
as a natural ally for the NAACP. In a 1943 memo, she pointed out that
“branches should be made more and more aware that the fight for Negro
rights is but one aspect of the larger fight for social and democratic gains
… for instance, the fight for up-grading of Negro workers might well
gain support if a given local branch would also take the leadership in
support of the labor movement's fight against anti-labor legislation.”95
Baker saw the complementary goals of interracial labor organizing and
civil rights activism as the basis for potential coalitions among groups or
even for a unified economic and political initiative within the African
American community.
During 1942 and 1943, Ella Baker became increasingly involved in
the labor movement, which was spearheaded by left-wing unions of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Founded in 1936 to organize
workers in entire mass-production industries rather than on the basis of
their particular skills, the CIO emphasized the mobilization of unskilled
and semiskilled workers. Considerable numbers of African Americans
worked in such positions, especially after wartime labor shortages
opened up employment opportunities in mines, steel plants, auto
factories, shipyards, and other essential industries.
In contrast to the cio, the more established American Federation of
Labor (AFL) had a long history of exclusionary and segregationist
practices. Earlier in 1942 the United Auto Workers (UAW), the cio's
largest member union, had taken an unequivocal stand in support of civil
rights for African Americans in Detroit in a conflict that erupted over
black families' access to the Sojourner Truth public housing project, a
struggle that erupted into a full-scale riot in 1943. The UAW's position in
the controversy won it the respect and support of local black leaders and
prospective union members and the attention of antiracist activists in the
NAACP. On the national level, CIO leadership had taken a firm stand
against antiblack hate strikes initiated by white segregationists within the
union. The CIO represented a stronger commitment to interracial union
organizing than any other major labor organization of its day.96
In November 1942, Baker became involved in the CIO'S efforts to
organize shipyard workers in Newport News, Virginia. She believed
strongly in linking economic and social justice issues and, for her, civil
rights and labor were a perfect fit. The AFL, which had unionized skilled
workers in particular trades, competed with the CIO for the allegiance of
less-skilled workers and laborers, many of whom were black. As Baker
described that struggle:
The CIO is here to organize the southeastern shipyard and the local
branch is playing ball with the organizers and both CIO and NAACP
are expecting to win through the contact. Yesterday several hours
were spent in conference with reps of the International
Longshoremen's Association, which is the one bona fide Negro
group in the AF of L here; and the AF of L is attempting to use
them as a buffer between the Negro and the damaging CIO policies
of non-discrimination. Hence I am trying to aid the branch in
avoiding an appearance of partisanism in this growing labor
dispute; and yet at the same time make membership gains in both
fields. This is not easy because the President [of the local NAACP
branch] and many of the officials have already gone on record as
being more CIO than AFL.97
Despite her public profession of neutrality, Baker revealed her partisan
support for the CIO in a letter to Lucille Black: “The CIO is moving in,
organizing everything… . I wish I could stay here several months. It is
just the time to do a real piece of organizing for the NAACP, but as usual, I
can only linger long enough to stir up sufficient interest to increase the
membership by a few hundred and collect a few dollars… . I am rushing
to a CIO meeting.”98 Baker appreciated the mass appeal of the labor
movement, especially that of the CIO during its initial organizing
campaigns. In her view, the mobilization of African Americans in the
workplace and in the community were inextricably related, and the
NAACP as well as the CIO would gain from the upsurge in activism. She
had, after all, worked with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in
New York, as an extension of her community organizing work on racial
and economic justice in the 1930s.
The CIO was also trying to organize in the sugar, laundry, and paper
box industries.99 Allegations of racism in the AFL and charges of
communist involvement in the CIO escalated the level of antagonism
between the rival organizations, which peaked when a black CIO
organizer was beaten up, presumably by AFL supporters, and “a free for
all fight ensued.”100
The allegations concerning the cio's ostensible ties to communism
prompted Baker to defend the union. It is unclear whether she believed
that the political affiliation of union organizers should not matter or
whether she thought that the allegations were unfounded. Based on her
later wavering on the issue, it is most likely that she leaned toward the
latter position. She reported to Walter White that she chastised AFL
leaders for using the “red scare” to try to deter black workers from
joining the cio. In 1943, the so-called red scare had a different historical
meaning than it would just a few years later when Cold War
anticommunism permeated the culture. This issue would polarize the
NAACP in the postwar years, with the national leadership taking a firmly
anticommunist position and purging members who had communist
affiliations. In 1943, Baker was condemning a practice that would later
take hold in her own organization and to which she would briefly
consent. In any case, she was pleased to report that “the best-thinking
Negroes have not been brought into the picture on the side of the status
quo. To the contrary, the most articulate community leaders are definitely
pro-CIO. This includes the president of our branch, and most of the
members of the executive board.”101 In her official statements, however,
Baker “neither lauded the CIO or damned the AFL; but stressed the greater
need for Negroes to be on guard to protect their special interests within
and outside of the organized labor movement.”102 As an official NAACP
representative, she felt compelled to express a neutral position publicly,
so as to not “expose the NAACP to the criticism of being partisan.”103
Ella Baker's support for the CIO was tempered by an awareness of
some of its internal weaknesses. Above all, she worried that the cio's
animus against the AFL might cause conflicts among black workers
themselves. For example, she deplored the fact that a young black man
named Elijah Jackson “was so definitely anti-AFL that he could barely be
civil in company with Negro AFL members.”104 A number of black
workers in the shipyard industry, especially in the building trades, were
in AFL-affiliated unions.105 Baker wanted to be able to bring the entire
black community and its allies together around the shared concern for
racial and social justice, and she saw sectarianism of any kind, including
within the labor movement, as an obstacle to that objective. This
inclusive, democratic sensibility persisted throughout her career as an
organizer, as did her commitment to militant trade union activism. In a
1947 speech in Atlanta, she admonished black civil rights workers to
“identify themselves with the labor fight, as well as other fights of
oppressed people everywhere.”106
Ella Baker's work alongside southern labor activists was yet another
example of her willingness to venture into a predominantly male terrain.
Nearly all of the union members mentioned in her correspondence were
men. Since the shipbuilding and steel industries with which she had the
most contact employed a predominantly male work force, it is likely she
was the only woman in many of the meetings she attended. But this did
not deter her; she seemed to not even notice the gender aberration her
presence represented.
Baker was not naive about sexism, but her approach was to simply
plow ahead as if she expected no one to stop her—and, more often than
not, no one did. But she did not try to ignore sexism in the hope that it
would just go away. She pushed for broader inclusion and fairer
treatment of other women and took opportunities to make women feel
valued within the organization, including women whose main roles in
life were those of wife and mother. In one instance, she publicly
commended an Alabama woman for her intention to take out NAACP
memberships for each of her five children. Citing her as an example of
“progressive motherhood,” Baker invited the woman to have a picture
taken for an NAACP publication in order to inspire other mothers to do
likewise.107 This was her way of demonstrating that there was a place in
the organization for everyone, homemakers as well as wage workers.
Like workers, women were another underutilized group that Baker
saw as integral to the NAACP's efforts. When asked by a new member
about the prospect of starting up a separate women's auxiliary to one of
the existing branches, Baker scoffed at the idea. It would, she felt,
marginalize women and circumscribe their participation, excluding them
from the mainstream of the organization. In direct response to this
suggestion, Baker noted: “It is my opinion that any woman who wishes
to contribute to the welfare of the Association can find opportunity to do
so through the regular branch program… . From our experience we have
found that women who become members of the women's auxiliary tend
to isolate themselves from the main program of the Association and to
forget that money-raising, as important as it is, can never take the place
of the purpose for which the NAACP was organized.”108 Perhaps not
surprisingly, the person inquiring about the establishment of a separate
women's auxiliary was a man, not a woman.
Although Baker had been politically mentored in the all-female
environment of the black Baptist missionary movement, she felt that the
NAACP's relative openness to women's participation should be exploited
and expanded. When she assumed her post as director of branches, she
emphasized explicitly that women and men should be considered equally
for all jobs.109 Such measures, she believed, would enhance the strength
of the larger struggle by enhancing the personnel base from which the
group could draw to carry out its programs. Moreover, she did not want
to see women who wanted to play a role in the movement have their
aspirations eclipsed because of sexism.
One important aspect of Baker's efforts to recruit more active
members, men and women, into the ranks of the NAACP was her
personalized approach to political work. At the same time that she sought
to recruit large numbers of people to join the NAACP, she still tried to
recognize and affirm the value of each individual. This type of
personalism or humanism became Ella Baker's trademark as an
organizer. In her travels throughout the South on behalf of the NAACP, she
met hundreds of ordinary black people and established enduring
relationships with many of them. She slept in these people's homes, ate
at their tables, spoke in their churches, and earned their trust. And she
was never too busy, despite her intense schedule, to send off a batch of
personal thank-you notes, sending regards to those she did not contact
directly and expressing gratitude for the support and hospitality she had
received. In a follow-up letter to local activists in Birmingham, she
wrote: “I enjoyed my stay in the Magic City, I enjoyed working with Mr.
Green in his official capacity as President of the branch, and most
especially I remember the pleasant hours spent in your home and your
presence… . Please give my regards to Mereva, and Aunt and Uncle
Guice.” She also promised to “write a little note to all of the key
workers” to encourage them in their recruitment efforts.110 This was
typical of her warm, personal correspondence with many branch leaders.
Baker encouraged her male colleagues to follow her example of
forging stronger personal ties with individual activists on the branch
level. For example, she advised Walter White that the NAACP could be
strengthened by “paying some attention to the human interest angle of
correspondence from branches, such as the recognition of the illness and
death of branch officers and workers.”111 Baker often intervened in order
to maintain good relationships between the national office and the
organization's constituency. On one occasion, White had neglected to
respond to a request for support from the Newport News branch
regarding a dispute in which a veterans hospital had recruited black
nurses from Tuskegee and neglected to provide housing for them. Baker
reminded the executive secretary that “sometime ago the Newport News
branch wrote you for advice on the Kecoughtan Veterans Facility… .
They are quite anxious to hear from you at your earliest convenience.”
Baker covered for White by telling the branch leaders that he was
“unusually busy,” but she promised that she “would call the matter to
[his] attention,” which she promptly did.112
A keen judge of character, Baker used her insights into human
behavior to work effectively with others. In one instance, while
negotiating with an older NAACP member who had decided to deed her
estate to the organization on her death, Baker was careful not to seem too
eager and push for a more immediate contribution in the form of a life
membership, “les[t] she thinks … I think of her as a gift horse.”113 Baker
was very sensitive about how she came across to the people in the
communities where she did outreach work. An organizer did not have to
have the perfect political strategy but did have to have the respect and
trust of those he or she struggled alongside. This was Baker's contention.
GIVE PEOPLE LIGHT AND THEY WILL
FIND THE WAY
In 1943, Ella Baker became the director of branches, supervising the
field secretaries and coordinating the national office's work with local
groups. As the highest-ranking female staff member, she had greater
influence over national policy, although never as much as she would
have liked. The post put her in a better position to pursue her agenda for
a more democratic, inclusive, and action-oriented organization. But the
way in which she was appointed to the post was itself an example of the
kind of dictatorial style that Baker was anxious to undo.
While working on a membership drive in Mobile, Alabama, in the
spring of 1943, she received a rather terse letter from Walter White
announcing her new appointment. She was floored. Since the post had
been left vacant for nearly two years after William Pickens left the
organization in 1941, Baker wondered why there was such a rush to fill it
now. When Baker resigned the position three years later, she recalled her
appointment as an example of the organization's internal problems. In
her words: “[T]he manner in which I was appointed or rather “drafted”
as Director of Branches indicated a thought pattern that does not lend
itself to healthy staff relations… . At no time had we [White and Baker]
discussed the directorship either in respect to myself or to anyone else…
. [M]y right to an opinion in the matter was completely discounted.”114
Although Baker was pretty sure that her friends Thurgood Marshall and
Bill Hastie had influenced White to chose her for the post, the timing and
awkward process led her to believe that White was trying to make an
impression or cover up some past oversight. Baker never got over the
way in which she had been shuttled into leadership without consultation
or consent.
Baker's reply to White's letter of appointment indicated that she was
flattered as well as surprised. She asked to discuss the implications of the
new assignment before she gave him her answer. White had not
anticipated the possibility that Baker would decline the post, and he had
issued statements to the press at the same time that he sent her the letter
“offering” her the job.115 Such presumptuous arrogance, which was not
unusual for White, demonstrated that he viewed Baker as more of a
pawn than a peer. She accepted the new title with some trepidation,
viewing it as an opportunity to effect some of the changes she felt were
sorely needed in the NAACP.
A top priority for the new director of branches was to lessen the
organization's bureaucracy and White's dominating role in it. Baker was
disturbed by the fact that “the program was more or less channeled
through the head [the executive secretary and the national office] and not
the people out in the field.”116 While working as a field secretary, Baker
had lobbied for a regional or state structure that would reduce the rigid
hierarchy within the association and place more power in the hands of
capable and heroic local leaders like her friend Harry Moore in
Florida.117 In one letter to Wilkins, Baker reminded him that “regional
secretaries are an imminent need.”118 Baker also advocated giving
greater responsibility and autonomy to local branches. In 1942, she urged
the development of “neighborhood units” on the model of Birmingham.
These would not be “separate branches, but in the neighborhood there is
a chairman and a co-chairman, and various committees.” The value of
such a substructure, she contended, “is that you have more people
participating in branch work and you are able to contact more persons
who perhaps will never get to the general branch meeting but will attend
little neighborhood meetings.”119 Her goal was to make the organization
more accessible to people at every level of involvement. Baker suggested
that branch supervision be “decentralized,” allowing field workers to
work more closely with individual branches.120
Ella Baker's strong commitment to local leadership persisted
throughout her career as an activist. She once commented that “persons
living and working in a community are in a better position to select
leadership for a community project than one coming into the
community.”121 As far as Baker was concerned, that observation applied
as much to NAACP branches during the 1940s as it did to SNCC in the
Mississippi Delta during the mid-1960s. By 1942, Baker had become
quite vocal in her criticisms of bureaucratic leadership. She insisted that
the strength of an organization grew from the bottom up, not the top
down. “The work of the National Office is one thing, but the work of the
branches is in the final analysis the life blood of the Association,” she
argued.122 In many respects, Baker's criticisms of the organization
closely resembled Du Bois's. In 1946, the year Baker resigned from her
post as director of branches, Du Bois argued that “power and authority”
were too tightly concentrated “among a small tight group which issues
directives to the mass of members.” Like Baker, Du Bois concluded that
the association had to “hand down and distribute authority to regions and
branches.”123
A fundamental commitment to democratic practice distinguished Ella
Baker's progressive politics. She despised elitism and placed her
confidence in the many rather than the few, however talented and
enlightened they might be. Moreover, she had come to recognize that the
bedrock of any serious social change organization is not the eloquence or
expertise of its top leaders; it lies, instead, in the commitment and hard
work of the rank-and-file membership and the willingness and ability of
those members to engage in a vibrant and reciprocal process of
discussion, debate, and decision making. Baker carried this viewpoint
with her into her organizing efforts with the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference during the 1950s. She felt that the national NAACP
relied too heavily on its lawyers and educated spokesmen and neglected
its branch structure. Legal initiatives were fine; but, without mass
campaigns waged in tandem, the victories were shallow and short-lived.
Baker was well aware that NAACP branches were floundering because
of a lack of direction or a lack of channels through which to contribute to
the larger struggle—or, worse still, they were stifled by the narrow, selfserving agendas of bureaucratic branch leaders. In Baker's view, there
was no excuse for local branches simply to serve as cheerleaders and
fund-raisers for the national office. Programs of action were key to the
vitality and relevance of local branches. In a letter to Lucille Black
written from Rome, Georgia, she remarked: “Rome manifests all the
expected symptoms of a branch that has had the same president for 24
years; and of a community that thinks nothing can be done in the South
that would challenge the status quo.”124 Bringing in new leadership and
challenging the black community's resignation in the face of Jim Crow
were, in Baker's mind, closely related; only people who refused to
become accustomed to things as they were had the determination to act
for change.
One of Ella Baker's first goals as director of branches was “to increase
the extent to which the present membership participates in national and
local activities.”125 She also pledged “to transform the local branches
from being centers of sporadic activity to becoming centers of sustained
and dynamic community leadership.”126 Toward that end, she organized
a series of regional leadership conferences designed to cultivate
leadership at the grassroots level. Initially, her idea for regional
gatherings met with opposition.127 But she mobilized the Committee on
Branches, which she had put together, to support the idea, and pressured
Walter White to allow her to proceed.
Interestingly, and probably not wholly by chance, Ella's old friend
Pauli Murray, the leftist lawyer who was then living in California, added
her voice to those supporting the leadership training initiative. In the
summer of 1944, just as Baker was making her case for the proposal,
Murray wrote to Walter White and Roy Wilkins endorsing a very similar
concept. In a witty and humorous letter to White, she demanded to know
“when you burn out fifty years from now, who is going to take your
place? When I burn out much sooner, who is going to be the gadfly
getting into people's hair and urging them to get things done? … The
NAACP needs a carefully worked out NAACP leadership training program
… where young men and women would sit down for several weeks and
discuss with you, Roy, Dean Hastie, Ella Baker and countless others the
problems and techniques of organization.”128 In her follow-up letter to
Wilkins, Murray stressed the need for such training on the branch level:
“In trotting over the country in my vagabond fashion, I am appalled at
the lag between the sure-fire fighting techniques developed by the
national office staff members and the slow, inefficient methods of local
volunteer officers. Race-relations has become a profession and its
workers should be technically trained. Who is more capable to lead off in
the training process than the national staff?”129 There is no paper trail
indicating that Ella Baker had requested Pauli Murray's timely
intervention, but it is likely that the two women were in touch, as they
had been on and off for over a decade. Murray singled out Baker for
praise in her letter to White: “I've seen Ella in action and they don't come
finer.”130
Ella Baker's leadership conferences were an enormous success; and
when she left the association in 1946, Roy Wilkins remembered them as
one of her main contributions to the national organization.131 The first
regional leadership conference was held in New York City on November
11–12, 1944. The purpose of the conference was “to emphasize the basic
techniques and procedures for developing and carrying out programs of
action in the branches.”132 Over 150 delegates from seventy-three
branches and six states attended the two-day conference, which
addressed such topics as individual and mass protest, political pressure,
education and propaganda, legal action, and cooperation and
collaboration with other groups.133 Baker was very concerned with the
mechanics of movement building. She thought that, rather than simply
telling people to develop a program, the association should impart to
them the skills and information necessary to carry out such a task
effectively and with confidence.
Between 1944 and 1946, under Baker's direction, leadership
conferences were held in Shreveport, Tulsa, Atlanta, Jacksonville,
Chicago, Easton (Pennsylvania), and Indianapolis.134 Baker pulled in top
officials to deliver lectures, offer welcoming remarks, and conduct
workshops. Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, and Walter White all
participated at one time or another.135 For the conference held in New
York, Gloster Current, president of the Detroit branch, and Leslie Perry
of the Washington Bureau, which focused on lobbying and litigation,
were flown in to speak. Baker also drew on the expertise of people
outside the official structure of the association; for example, she invited
Grace Hamilton of the Atlanta Urban League and Dorothy Homer of the
New York Public Library. Ministers in towns where the conferences
were convened were always asked to participate.136 At the conference
held at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Indianapolis in January 1945, both
the city's mayor and Indiana's governor delivered welcoming addresses;
Ella Baker and Thurgood Marshall represented the national NAACP.137 At
the Atlanta conference held in March, Baker and Marshall were
accompanied by the national membership secretary, Lucille Black, and
an assistant field secretary, Donald Jones. Building on the lessons of the
two previous conferences, the Atlanta meeting had a much more detailed
agenda. An evening session led by Marshall focused on such concrete
issues as “police brutality; discrimination in public facilities, city parks
and playgrounds; segregation in Inter-State Transportation; job
discrimination; the G.I. Bill of Rights … and the Negro Veteran; and …
Labor Legislation.”138 Venues were chosen to maximize attendance:
after daytime proceedings at Atlanta's Butler Street ymca, evening mass
meetings were held at Bethel Church.
Two residents of Montgomery, Alabama, who attended the Atlanta
meeting later played decisive roles in the Civil Rights Movement. E. D.
Nixon, an organizer for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and
Rosa Parks, a local NAACP activist, became key figures in the momentous
Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. Parks confided in Baker some time
later that this was the first time she had traveled outside the Montgomery
area, and the experience made a lasting impression.139 “I know Ella
Baker had a profound effect on Rosa Parks,” observed an activist who
knew both women.140 Years later, Parks agreed.141
In preparation for the leadership conferences, Baker sent out
questionnaires asking what topics participants wanted to discuss at the
gatherings. She tried to set an agenda that did not assume that the experts
and national leaders were there to enlighten the masses. The title of the
leadership conferences Baker coordinated was “Give People Light and
They Will Find the Way.” This title, drawn from one of Baker's favorite
hymns, captures the essence of what she was trying to accomplish. She
believed that people did not really need to be led; they needed to be
given the skills, information, and opportunity to lead themselves.
TIME TO MOVE ON
The view that common people were capable of identifying the problems
they faced and learning how to address them was shared by some of
Baker's NAACP colleagues, but not by all. As she began to assert herself
in the leadership of the NAACP, Baker made Walter White more and more
uneasy. She was outspoken in executive staff meetings, criticized White
when she thought he was wrong, and insisted on being either consulted
about decisions affecting the branches or left alone to follow her own
course. The association's resistance to engaging in mass mobilizations
and grassroots organizing, coupled with the lack of internal democracy
that prevented internal dialogue about such issues, contributed to Baker's
decision to resign her post as director of branches in 1946.
Some of her NAACP colleagues found Baker's manner abrasive and her
straightforward style annoying. A common word used to describe her
was “difficult.”142 The ways in which she often described herself are
consistent with the notion that she was deliberately “difficult.” That is,
she did not ingratiate herself with those in high positions, and she did not
hesitate to speak her mind even when her ideas were controversial. To
men like Walter White, this made her difficult. Baker was really never
much of a team player, in the affable, conformist sense of the term. One
problem was that she said what others thought but were more discreet
about. She gave concrete meaning to the slogan “Speak truth to power.”
For example, there seems to have been an almost universal consensus
among the New York staff that Walter White was egotistical, vain, and
short-sighted. People whispered about him in the hallway, and many of
his staff criticized him in private.143 Baker recalled White as someone
who went out of his way to remind everyone around him how important
he was. For example, he would keep visitors waiting to give them the
impression that he was too busy with more urgent matters to see them at
the agreed-upon time. He would also walk into the middle of the office
where the telephone switchboard was located to confer with the operator
in a loud voice about the calls he was expecting from one important
person or another.144 His motives were transparent to most observers.
However, most staff members discreetly kept their negative opinions of
White to themselves. According to Herbert Hill, an NAACP staff member
during the years shortly after Baker's tenure and later the architect of the
NAACP's labor programs, “Ella made no secret of her contempt for Walter
White.”145 Neither did Du Bois. As a result, both Baker and Du Bois
were nudged out of the organization.
Baker realized that her days on the national staff were numbered
when she and her friend Ruby Hurley openly defied Walter White's
leadership at an Administrative Committee meeting in the winter of
1944. Hurley and Baker abstained from a vote endorsing a letter White
wanted to send the mayor of New York City regarding a controversy that
was brewing at Harlem's Sydenham Hospital. White, who was not at the
meeting himself, was offended by his subordinates' independence and
sent off a terse memo reprimanding Baker and Hurley and asking for an
explanation of their actions. Baker cited this incident two years later in
her letter of resignation, indicating that she “knew then that independent
thinking was not to be tolerated on the staff.”146 She also knew that she
could not operate comfortably for very long in such an environment.
The relationship between Baker and White grew more tense over the
next year. He was not accustomed to anyone questioning his
administrative decisions and viewed it as an affront to his leadership. For
example, when White finally moved to implement Baker's suggestion
that regional secretaries be hired to coordinate branch work, she
applauded the decision but challenged the procedure as unfair, pointing
out that there should be more detailed discussion throughout the
organization before such important changes were made. She added that,
before new staff were hired from the outside, present staff should be
given an opportunity to apply for the new positions.147
The more Baker pushed for accountability regarding administrative
decisions, the more White prodded her for alleged infractions of office
procedure. White's charges seem petty or even fabricated. In November
1945, he dictated a stinging memo complaining that Baker was not
working hard enough. He asserted that “throughout your time with the
Association you have been out of the office on personal matters more
than any other executive to the detriment of your work and office
morale.”148 By all other indications, Baker was a tireless worker. On
several occasions, she ignored her own health and came into the office
against doctor's orders to perform some of the seemingly never-ending
tasks associated with her job.149 Baker's grueling itinerary for the years
she was with the NAACP belies Walter White's suggestion that she was not
pulling her weight in the organization. Moreover, it was only because
White took the time to calculate Baker's days off over a five-year period
that he was able to assert that she had taken more time off than any of
her co-workers. Such research had to have been undertaken with a
precise motive in mind. Even if Baker was off sick more than others, she
certainly was not shirking her responsibilities, as White argued, since her
calendar indicated that she worked evenings, weekends, and holidays
throughout her tenure with the association. It was probably no
coincidence that White's reprimand of Baker came only a week after
Baker's criticism of White's unilateral action regarding the regional
secretaries.
White's criticism of Baker for taking too much personal time was
particularly callous and insensitive given the fact that Baker had just
suffered a bereavement. The main reason she had requested personal
time off during the months leading up to White's memo was the
prolonged, terminal illness of her cousin Martha Grinage, whom she
regarded as a sister. Martha had grown up with Ella in North Carolina,
moving in with Ella's family after her own mother's death, and Ella had
stayed with Martha when she first came to New York in 1927. Ella felt
closer to Martha than she did to her own sister, Maggie. Martha was
seriously ill and in and out of the hospital throughout the summer and
fall of 1945. On several occasions, Ella rearranged her travel and
meeting schedules in order to visit and help care for Martha.150 After
Martha died on October 16, Walter White did not even attend the funeral;
he sent an impersonal telegram instead.151
Later that winter, Baker's family responsibilities expanded again as
she adopted her nine-year-old niece, Jackie. In January 1946, Ella's
brother, Curtis, wrote to her that Jackie “was asking about her relatives
up north.”152 Jackie was the daughter of Ella's younger sister, Maggie.
Since Maggie was unable to care for the child, the responsibility had
fallen to Ella's mother and brother. Maggie had always been known as
the wild and wayward child.153 “My sister wasn't going to be very
responsible [for the child] anyway,” Ella admitted, “so, mama and papa
[before his death] took the baby.”154 By the mid-1940s, Anna Ross
Baker was aging and less able to care for Jackie, and Curtis, who was
unmarried, may have been reluctant to become her primary caregiver. So
Ella Baker agreed to take responsibility for the child, and Jackie moved
from Littleton, North Carolina, to New York City to live with her aunt.
Baker's new family commitment was a secondary factor contributing to
her decision to resign from her administrative post with the NAACP. She
anticipated that she would need to be closer to home for a while and
feared that the time and travel commitments required by the job might be
incompatible with her new parental responsibilities. At age forty-two, for
all intents and purposes, Baker became a mother, a role she had not
planned for herself, but one she embraced after it was thrust on her.
A conventional mother she was not. Jackie later recalled: “I had to
move fast to keep up with her. I would sit in the back of meetings and do
my homework many a night.”155 Ella relied on her husband and a female
neighbor to assist with child-rearing. Baker recollected that “we could
depend on Miss Lena being there to look out the window at the right
time, and then [Jackie] would go upstairs to her place and be fed … she
went to Miss Lena's regularly because I frequently had night
meetings.”156 Bob seems to have filled in as well. One friend observed
that “he did help look after the child, he helped Ella in that way.”157
Although Baker remained closer to home after Jackie came to live with
her, she did not confine her work to a regular eight-hour day. She relied
on others to help care for Jackie and tried to keep up an active pace of
work.
Baker was already looking for another job when she decided to adopt
Jackie. She responded to White's reprimand immediately by looking for
other employment. In November 1945, she contacted Mary McLeod
Bethune, the prominent civil rights activist, to inquire about job
possibilities. Baker and Bethune were not friends, but they were
acquainted. Bethune, nearly thirty years Baker's senior, had gone to a
boarding school in North Carolina, had contemplated becoming a
missionary, was fiercely independent, and was deeply committed to
community service and political activism—although of a somewhat
different sort than Ella Baker's grassroots community organizing.
Bethune was an educator and founder of Bethune-Cookman College, a
friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, adviser to President Roosevelt, and leader
of the black women's club movement.158 She was certainly one of the
most high-profile and politically influential black women of her
generation. She knew of Ella Baker's work and respected her reputation
as an organizer. Bethune responded cordially to Baker's inquiry,
acknowledged her skills and talents, but no job offer was ever made.159
When Ella Baker left the NAACP's national staff in May 1946, it was
not primarily because she was a new parent, although that was a
contributing factor. She left mainly because she had little confidence that
the national organization would make room for dissenting opinions or
differing political views:
My reasons for resigning are basically three—I feel that the
Association is falling short of its present possibilities; that the full
capacities of the staff have not been used; that there is little chance
of mine being utilized in the immediate future. Neither one nor all
of these reasons would induce me to resign if I felt that objective
and honest discussion were possible and that remedial measures
would follow. Unfortunately, I find no basis for expecting this. My
reactions are not sudden but accumulative, and are based upon my
own experience during the past five years and the experience of
other staff, both present and former.160
Although Baker was characteristically honest in voicing her strong
criticisms of the way the organization operated, she confined her
opinions this time to a letter sent directly to the executive secretary and
declined to make her criticisms a public issue at the NAACP's national
convention, a move that Gloster Current, her colleague, successor, and
sometime nemesis, saw as a “gracious gesture.”161 It was probably more
practical and strategic on Baker's part than anything else. She understood
that the NAACP was still a powerful and in many ways effective black
freedom organization, although hampered by its internal weaknesses.
She did not want to discredit the organization publicly, and she had every
intention of continuing to work with the NAACP on terms more to her
liking.
Baker's departure from the national staff came as such a blow to many
of her associates at the branch level that she was inundated with letters
expressing gratitude for her assistance and pleading with her to stay on.
After learning of her resignation, her friend John Leflore, a labor
organizer and NAACP leader in Mobile, wrote: “All of us here and people
throughout the country whom we have talked to, and who know you,
have nothing but praise [for your work] … we have grown to love
you.”162 Baker appreciated the words of praise and thanks she received
from branch members, and she assured friends like Leflore that, while
she was stepping down as director of branches, she was by no means
resigning from the struggle. Baker's reputation and personal ties were
strong enough that some NAACP branch leaders continued to treat her as if
she were an official of the organization. Long after she had left the
national office, Baker received a steady flow of invitations to speak at
NAACP branch events across the South. For example, in January 1947, she
went to Atlanta to help launch the annual membership drive at Big
Bethel Church. The newspaper account of her visit reported that she
“electrified” the audience, giving them both a history lesson and a
political directive. Slaves were not given their freedom by Abraham
Lincoln, Baker claimed; black soldiers fought and died for their freedom
in the Civil War. The 1940s were no different, she insisted. Before
stepping down from the podium, Baker called on her listeners to ally
themselves with “the cause of oppressed people everywhere.”163 As she
had told John Leflore, her commitment to the more activist and militant
forces of the NAACP did not depend on her being on the payroll of the
national office.
Although Ella Baker had developed a national network through her
role as director of branches, she spent the last few years of her tenure
cultivating ties to progressive individuals and organizations in New York
as well. It was through this network that Baker was able to find
employment. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, she managed to piece
together an income through a series of odd jobs with several civil rights
and community service organizations. Her longest employment stint was
with the New York Cancer Committee, where she coordinated a public
health education program. This was important work, but it was not her
life's calling. It was not long before she plunged back into politics.
In the early 1950s, Baker would turn her attention from the national
political stage to the local one in Harlem and New York City. The
northern-based black freedom struggle was long overlooked, Baker felt;
so, after her departure from the NAACP's national staff, she would ground
herself in the struggles that burdened the lives of her own neighbors,
friends, and family in New York. She soon realized that a local focus still
could not keep at bay national politics and even global rivalries.
5 COPS, SCHOOLS, AND
COMMUNISM
LOCAL POLITICS AND GLOBAL IDEOLOGIES-NEW
YORK CITY IN THE 1950s
I came into the social justice movements at the height of the repression of
the Cold War period… . Organizations seeking civil rights, peace and
justice had been crushed everywhere… . And although I discovered in
those years that there was always a resistance movement, many people
did indeed fall into silence… . But the one thing that could not be
crushed was a burning desire of African Americans to be free.
Anne Braden, 1999
In 1952, Ella Baker was elected president of the large New York City
NAACP branch, becoming its first woman president. She had been active
in the branch for several years working with the youth council and
several other projects, but her new post provided her with the latitude
and authority to orchestrate some of the kinds of political campaigns she
had long envisioned. After traveling around the country for two decades
aiding grassroots groups to develop activist campaigns for change, she
now had an opportunity to shape and direct such a movement in the heart
of New York City. Her base of operations was Harlem, where she had
long experience and manifold ties with diverse groups of black and white
political activists and progressive intellectuals. Actually, she moved
branch headquarters from offices downtown to the heart of the black
community in Harlem to be more in the thick of things. Baker led the
New York City branch the way she thought all NAACP branches should
function. She identified issues of concern to black people—ordinary
working people as well as professionals—and involved as many
members as possible in building direct action campaigns to address those
issues. She also worked hard to build coalitions with other groups in the
city. In New York, unlike many smaller cities where the NAACP was the
only civil rights organization in town, the black political scene was
eclectic and contentious. But Baker was able to deal with the
personalities and navigate the territorial rivalries of various organizations
with finesse. Part of the key to her success was that she relished rather
than resented other organizational involvement. Every action did not
have to be carried out in the NAACP's name. In fact, Baker maintained
multiple organizational affiliations even as she presided over the New
York branch.
During 1952 and 1953, under Ella Baker's leadership, the New York
NAACP branch built coalitions with other groups in the city and carried
out aggressive campaigns focused primarily on school reform and
desegregation and on police brutality.1 In the course of these campaigns,
Baker employed the whole range of protest tactics she had taught others
to utilize: sending public letters of protest, leading noisy street
demonstrations, confronting the mayor in front of the news media, and
even running for public office, after temporarily taking off her NAACP
hat. Baker's photograph and her fiery words appeared regularly in New
York City newspapers, as she demanded quality, public education for all
New York students, with active parental participation, and called for
public accountability and fair treatment for people of color from the
police. Often at the head of a crowd of supporters, acting in concert with
other groups and individuals, Baker led the New York City NAACP into
action alongside progressive whites and Puerto Ricans, the city's secondlargest group of people of color.
In her efforts at coalition-building, Baker tried to avoid the divisive
Cold War politics that defined the national scene during the early 1950s
and threatened to infect the debates over local issues. While Baker
continued to have regular contact with Walter White, Roy Wilkins, and
Gloster Current, her successor as director of branches, with whom she
had a civil but strained relationship, she tried to function as
independently as possible. She contacted the executive officers regarding
fund-raising efforts, membership strategies, and incidents that occurred
in the city that both the New York branch and the national office might
respond to. It took a conscious, continuous effort for Baker to carve out
her own path in the very backyard of the national office. The personality
conflicts and the tension between the national organization and local
branches that created long-standing problems in the association were
compounded, during the early 1950s, by the growing influence of
anticommunism.
The national NAACP asserted its intention to step up the push for racial
progress in the wake of World War II when it convened the National
Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization in Washington, D.C., in January
1950. The tone and flavor of the event, however, suggested that the
organization's national leaders intended to carry out that work safely
within the bounds of Cold War rhetoric and ideology. The gathering
brought together over 4,000 African American civic, community, and
religious leaders in the nation's capital to press President Truman to take
stronger action on pending civil rights initiatives. Demands included a
permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission and voting rights
protection.
The organization wanted to send another message to the Truman
administration as well. Roy Wilkins and his colleagues were anxious to
defend and reaffirm the NAACP's reputation against allegations of ties
with communism. Anticommunist campaigners charged that the NAACP
membership included those who presently or formerly belonged to the
Communist Party and that communist ideas therefore dominated the
association. This was hardly the case, but in the volatile political climate
of 1950, and in the wake of the 1947 government decision to require
loyalty oaths of federal employees, charges of communist links seemed
tantamount to charges of treason. The national NAACP responded by
denying the allegations outright, despite the prominent role played by
well-known leftists of various ideological bents, including communists,
in joint campaigns for racial justice over the previous thirty years.
The conveners of the National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization
went to great lengths formally and publicly to exclude radicals with any
hint of communist affiliation. The conference call explicitly declared the
mobilization to be a “nonpartisan, non-leftist movement rejecting the
persistent proffers of ‘cooperation’ and ‘assistance’ made by individuals
and organizations long identified as apologists for communist doctrine
and Soviet foreign policies.” The mobilization in Washington was only
the beginning. At its annual convention in Boston in June, the NAACP
formally barred communists from membership and following the lead of
the cio—which had recently taken similar steps—proceeded to purge
leftists from its ranks.2 This undemocratic stance was partly a defensive
capitulation to the virulent redbaiting that was quickly permeating the
political culture. At the same time, it was a continuation and deepening
of longstanding tensions between the policies of the dominant leadership
and the leftist politics of other antiracist activists, including some who
were also NAACP members.
Like most black radicals living in New York City in 1950, Ella Baker
had friends and colleagues who were communists. She often disagreed
with them but she had worked with them off and on for over twenty
years. Baker had managed to stay clear of the debate surrounding the
Emergency Mobilization in January, and she had not figured prominently
in the arguments that took place at the NAACP's Boston convention. But
as head of the New York branch, in a city known for its radical political
culture, Ella Baker would not be able to dodge the issues indefinitely.3
In the early 1950s in New York and elsewhere, there was a vibrant
and multifaceted campaign for quality, integrated public education.
Baker brought passion as well as long experience to the issue of
educational reform. She was her mother's daughter, so education had
always been near and dear to her heart. In contrast to Anna Ross Baker's
rather conventional notions of teaching and learning, Ella was eager to
explore more creative pathways to knowledge. In the 1930s, she had
focused her energies on adult education. In the late 1940s and early
1950s, as the parent of a school-aged child, she turned her attention to
elementary and secondary education. Jackie was enrolled in a private
Quaker school for most of her time in New York, a sign of Ella's
commitment to raising her daughter in an integrated, progressive, and
nurturing milieu. But Baker knew that private solutions to public
problems were not solutions at all. Her deep interest in public education
led Baker to team up with the well-known psychologist and civil rights
activist Kenneth Clark and his equally accomplished, less often
recognized wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, to push for improved conditions
for poor, largely African American and Latino schoolchildren in New
York City. Through her relationship with the Clarks, Baker became a
strong proponent of “community-based” models of learning in which
parents were empowered to help define priorities and design curricula for
their children. In this struggle, she also worked alongside Stanley
Levison's wife, Bea, who was a reading tutor at the child development
center run by the Clarks and a strong supportor of their work.4
Ella Baker joined a growing community of education reformers who
sought fundamental changes in public education and child welfare
policies that went well beyond the simple demand for integration. Milton
Galamison, an African American activist in Brooklyn, and Annie Stein, a
Jewish communist who was also active in Brooklyn, were pushing the
national NAACP leaders as well as city officials to take more aggressive
actions.5Baker led her Harlem-based group, Parents in Action, and the
citywide NAACP branch into the campaign, and out of that struggle
developed a relationship with both Galamison and Stein; the latter
became one of Baker's dear friends and close comrades. These were the
years in which the NAACP's long-term legal campaign to desegregate
public education was about to bear fruit in the landmark Supreme Court
decision Brown v. Board of Education, and community-based civil rights
activists sought to lay the basis for change once litigation had opened the
door to desegregation.
Baker officially began working with the Clarks during the early
1950s, although she may have known them earlier through her activities
with the NAACP and other organizations in New York. In August 1952,
she co-convened a meeting at the Clarks' home in suburban Hastings-onHudson, a frequent gathering place for New York's black activist
intellectuals, to talk about the issue of segregation in the New York
schools. In March 1953, a follow-up meeting was held at the same
location. These outreach meetings, directed at activists, educators, and
policymakers in the New York area, were an attempt to attract a broad
base of support for school desegregation and curricular reform in the
city.6
Both Kenneth and Mamie Clark were the children of Caribbean-born
parents, recipients of Ivy League doctorates in psychology, and staunchly
committed social activists. Kenneth was the first African American
accepted into Columbia University's graduate program in psychology; in
1942, he became the first black professor on the faculty of the City
College of New York.7 The couple's famous doll studies (which have
since been questioned) sought to demonstrate how black children's selfesteem was damaged by racism, as evidenced by their preference for
white over black dolls. The Clarks' doll studies were discussed at length
in the NAACP's brief in Brown v. Board of Education, and the Supreme
Court specifically cited the Clarks' work in its historic decision striking
down segregated schools as unconstitutional. The Clarks had long
careers as scholars and activists before and after the 1954 Brown
decision. In 1946 they established the Northside Center for Child
Development to provide “social work, psychological evaluation, and
remediation services for youth in Harlem since there were virtually no
mental health services in the community.”8 They were visible and vocal
participants in struggles over housing, health, and poverty, as well as
education.
In 1954, Baker agreed to serve as a member of the Intergroup
Committee, chaired by Kenneth Clark, which was set up by the New
York Board of Education to address some of the problems African
American and Latino children encountered in the public schools. On the
eve of the Brown decision, in April 1954, the committee hosted a
conference at the New Lincoln School in Manhattan, titled “Children
Apart,” which indicted the school system for instilling a sense of
inferiority in black children and perpetuating an enormous disparity in
the resources allocated to black versus white schools. The meeting drew
activists, social workers, educators, and parents from across the city and
kicked off several years of intense protests and lobbying for school
reform, school desegregation, and increased youth services in New York.
Baker was a paid staff person for the conference and devoted several
weeks of her time to planning the event, contributing her well-honed
organizing skills to ensure its success.9 She drafted literature and
conference documents, lined up speakers, coordinated publicity, met
with various participant groups, and strategized with other activists about
how to make the event effective in reaching their larger objectives. The
conference was perfectly timed: those who attended were primed to act
once the imminent legal victory in the Brown case created an opening for
change.
Ella Baker and the Clarks continued their work with the Intergroup
Committee; but, after several years of lobbying and working with city
officials, Baker was ready to move from debate to direct action. She
feared that her former colleagues at the national NAACP office would
either oppose such a step or slow it down with red tape. So, instead of
operating exclusively under the banner of the New York City NAACP
branch, Baker helped launch Parents in Action against Educational
Discrimination, a grassroots coalition composed primarily of African
American and Puerto Rican parents that demanded integrated schools
and greater parental participation in educational policymaking. Years
later, Baker recounted how the organization got started: “New York City
didn't act right after the ’54 decision. It didn't have any reason to act, so
you had to help it to realize it. I was asked to serve on the Mayor's
Commission. They finally discovered the city wasn't integrated! And
Bob Wagner the second was then Mayor, and we ended up by having
several sessions with him. In ’57, the entire summer was spent in weekly
parent workshops, helping parents become aware that they had certain
rights.”10
In the fall of 1957, the eyes of the nation were focused not on efforts
to desegregate public schools in northern cities but rather on the pitched
battle being waged in the streets of Little Rock, Arkansas, a
confrontation so intense that it led to a standoff between Orval Faubus,
the state's segregationist governor, and President Dwight Eisenhower,
culminating in the deployment of federal troops. Daisy Bates, Ella
Baker's friend and former NAACP colleague, was in the middle of the fray
as the leader of the local NAACP branch. Bates negotiated with local
school officials and police to try to ensure the protection of the nine
brave black teenagers who defied vicious mobs to enroll in Central High
School that fall. Bates's home was firebombed, and the newspaper that
she and her husband ran was forced to close down because of economic
pressures and harassment.11 In the South in this era, struggles to secure
basic legal rights were often met with violent reprisals.
Building on the attention that Little Rock had garnered, New York
activists were eager to point out that racial disparities were not unique to
the South and that militant challenges to government intransigence
would be necessary in New York City as well. As was often the case,
Baker found herself trying to push her civil rights colleagues—
particularly the national leaders of the NAACP—toward a more militant
stance at the same time that she was leading a popular struggle against
those in positions of government power. The national NAACP office,
afraid of negative publicity and of alienating its moderate, liberal
supporters, sought to discourage confrontation and advised the activists
to “adopt a less provocative endeavor, pointing out that after all northern
school officials, unlike the hostile segregationists of the south, had
agreed to integration; it was just a question of how and when,” according
to Galamison.12 Baker founded the grassroots parents' group in order to
circumvent the NAACP's paralytic bureaucracy and “go slow” politics.13
On September 26, 1957, Parents in Action called a rally designed to
up the ante and draw greater attention to the campaign. Baker led a
spirited picket line of over 500 black and Puerto Rican parents in front of
City Hall in Manhattan to protest the beginning of another school year
without a serious response to complaints these parents had been making
for years. The group was particularly angry with School Superintendent
William Jansen, but on this day they took their complaints directly to the
mayor. The parents group had planned this confrontation for months.
When the day of the scheduled demonstration finally arrived, Baker was
one of the angriest and most vocal of the protesters. Although many civil
rights activists later described Baker as a quiet, behind-the-scenes
organizer, she was by no means hesitant to exert her leadership in this
instance. News reports, which quoted Baker extensively, described her as
the leader and principal rabble-rouser in the group. Their grievances
included overcrowded schools, inappropriate curriculum content, the
disproportionate allocation of more experienced teachers away from
black and Latino schools, blatant racial segregation throughout the
system, and the unresponsiveness of school officials to parents' concerns.
On that Thursday morning, the protesters picketed for nearly two
hours demanding an immediate meeting with Mayor Robert Wagner.
Finally, when it was apparent that the group would not back down,
Wagner was persuaded by one of his colleagues to leave a meeting of the
Board of Estimates and see a delegation of twenty-one protesters, many
of them local ministers and NAACP activists, led by Ella Baker. Sara
Black, a reporter for the Harlem-based Amsterdam News, described the
meeting as follows: “From 11:55 to 12:12 Mayor Wagner spent an
uneasy 17 minutes facing the delegation … led by Mrs. Ella J. Baker …
while the parents leveled their charges… . Standing while the Mayor
twitched nervously, spokesman Baker said: ‘We parents want to know
first hand from you just what is, or is not, going to be done for our
children… . New York City, the world's leading city, should reflect the
highest degree of democracy in its public school system.’”14
The group demanded a follow-up meeting with the mayor, to which
he agreed. Baker then warned Wagner bluntly that he could not afford to
alienate black and Puerto Rican voters two months before he would be
on the ballot for reelection. After a few more sharp exchanges between
Baker and the mayor, the group left City Hall, exhausted and drained
after their four-hour-long protest, but claiming a tactical victory.15
The campaign for quality integrated schools in New York during the
1950s is historically significant.16 First, Baker and her allies went
beyond the simple demand for racial integration, calling for greater
parent and community involvement in running the schools. This
campaign was the first stage in the longer-term struggle for community
control of the schools, a volatile issue that reemerged during the late
1960s and early 1970s. To insist that parents be empowered to define
their children's education was a more substantive and radical demand
than simply saying that black and white children should sit next to each
other in the classroom. Complaining about distorted media coverage of
the New York school struggle in a letter to her friend Ruth Moore, Baker
wrote: “The headlines especially are designed to give the impression that
the only thing with which we are concerned is integration rather than the
fact that integration is desirable because where there is separation, even
in New York, the schools are too often inadequate.”17 Second, Baker
helped to forge an important biracial alliance between the African
American and Puerto Rican communities. Some of Baker's friends from
the school struggles of the 1950s became allies once again in the 1970s,
when Baker joined the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee to push for
Puerto Rican independence.
The other major cause that Baker championed during her tenure as
New York NAACP branch president was even more volatile: the campaign
against police brutality. Police brutality was a problem in black
communities throughout the nation, in the North as well as the South.
Baker had tackled it in both small towns and big cities during her work
as an NAACP field secretary. She was well aware that the issue had larger
ramifications. Not only did police brutality against individual black
people violate their civil rights, but the intimidation that the entire
community faced from local law enforcement was a key way that
oppressed communities were discouraged from political protest. From
1950 to 1953, the New York NAACP branch office received nearly 100
complaints about instances of police violence against blacks in the city.18
The issue came to a head in the summer of 1952 when two men, Jacob
Jackson and Samuel Crawford, were brutally beaten by two white
officers in the West 54th Street station house. One of the men was so
seriously injured that he needed brain surgery.19
In February 1953, public anger was fueled by allegations made by the
New York Telegram and Sun newspaper regarding a secret agreement
between the New York Police Department and the U.S. Justice
Department that discouraged the FBI from investigating brutality charges
leveled against the department and simply allowed the department to
handle such complaints as internal matters. The agreement rendered the
police department exempt from federal oversight. In March, Attorney
General James P. McGranery issued a statement that confirmed the
existence of the agreement but claimed it had already been terminated.20
In response to the initial revelation in the newspaper, Ella Baker issued a
sharply worded open letter to the mayor demanding “the immediate
resignation” of the police commissioner “to save the City of New York
from further disgrace.”21
The NAACP's national office and the New York City branch cosponsored a meeting in early February on the subject of police brutality.
Representatives from about a dozen other organizations in the city were
present. The group formulated a list of demands for the mayor, including
the dismissal of all federal and local officials implicated in the secret
agreement, an immediate and thorough review of all pending cases, the
establishment of a civilian review board, and immediate public
disclosure of all allegations of abuse.22 On February 29, 1953, the New
York NAACP sponsored a mass meeting at the Friendship Baptist Church
to protest police brutality. The speakers included Baker, police brutality
victim Jacob Jackson, Thurgood Marshall, Rev. Thomas Kilgore, and
Earl Brown, a progressive member of the New York City Council.23 Not
surprisingly, given his appetite for attention, Adam Clayton Powell,
Harlem's flamboyant black congressman, held his own rally against
police brutality at the exact same time as the NAACP event. Powell's plan
may have been prompted by resentment that he was not offered top
billing at the NAACP-sponsored meeting. Such ego rivalries and
organizational turf battles were familiar but nonetheless wearying to
Baker, and her tolerance for such political theatrics lessened as the years
passed.24
Later, in March 1953, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and
other police organizations tried to diffuse mounting criticisms by
denouncing the campaign against police brutality as a “Communist plot.”
The NAACP was one of the main groups attacked, along with councilman
Earl Brown. Baker's blunt reply was, “No communist plot can explain
away the fact that Jacob Jackson had to undergo two brain operations …
nor does it explain how other able-bodied persons have walked into
police precincts, but had to be carried out as hospital cases.”25
As a modest concession and half-hearted gesture to the protesters, the
police commissioner announced the inauguration of antibias training for
officers in order to ease tensions and reduce the chances that police
would treat black suspects in a way that might be regarded as using
excessive force. The training was to be overseen by a human relations
committee that included citizens who were not members of the police
force. Ironically, School Superintendent William Jansen, with whom
Baker had locked horns over racism in the educational system, headed
the police reform committee.26 Baker was not satisfied with the outcome
of the campaign and was determined to keep up the pressure with a
vigilant scrutiny of the police. The struggle continued to ebb and flow
for some years.
Ella Baker experimented with electoral politics in the early 1950s by
running unsuccessfully for the New York City Council on the Liberal
Party ticket. She first ran for city council in 1951 and lost.27 In 1953 the
slate was led by her friend Rev. James Robinson, an independent
candidate for mayor.28 In the November 1953 poll, Baker was defeated
handily by Earl Brown, the incumbent, her adversary in the election but
an ally in the NAACP campaign against police brutality.29 The defeat was
probably not unexpected and may have been cushioned a bit by the
support of friends like the ever-loyal Pauli Murray, who sent Baker an
encouraging note on the eve of the election, “just to wish you good luck
at the polls tomorrow … affectionately, Pauli.”30
Ella Baker's 1953 decision to resign temporarily from the NAACP
branch presidency in order to run for the New York City Council seems
an aberration within a career dedicated to grassroots organizing rather
than electoral politics. Later in life, Baker was openly skeptical of
electoral politics and career politicians. Within the context of her
community-based activism in New York, however, Baker's interest in
city politics makes more sense. Not only did the NAACP regularly tangle
with elected officials over issues such as school segregation and police
brutality, but the broad, popular participation that was characteristic of
New York City politics in this period made an electoral campaign seem a
logical extension of issue-oriented organizing. Baker may well have
realized that she could not win at the polls. The value of the campaign
lay not in a vain hope of victory but in the broad-based educational effort
that running for office entailed. In the early 1950s, as in later periods,
some civil rights activists saw electoral politics as simply another mode
of community organizing—a way to get issues in the spotlight. While the
Liberal Party's campaign platform focused on the rather tame issues of
cleaning up government corruption and inefficiency, the party did
include a statement in support of more educational funding (through
bond sales), opposition to bigotry and hate groups, and race-relations
training for police officers. These may have been some of the issues that
attracted Ella Baker to the party. But she was not the only African
American activist to work with the Liberal Party in the 1950s. A. Philip
Randolph, the socialist labor leader with whom Baker was closely
associated in the 1930s, had a brief affiliation with the party, and Pauli
Murray had been a Liberal candidate for city council in 1949. Murray's
and Baker's willingness to run for office on the Liberal Party ticket
suggests that it offered an appealing, although imperfect, alternative to
the Democratic and Republican Parties.31 So, clearly the party embodied
some of what independent black activists were looking for in this period.
The Liberal Party was founded in 1944 by David Dubinsky, the leader
of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), as an
offshoot of the more left-leaning American Labor Party, which Ella
Baker was also briefly aligned with before it split. The Liberal Party
drew an odd assortment of characters, a number of whom Baker had
worked with before. Jay Lovestone, with whom Baker and Murray had
been associated politically during the 1930s, was working with the
ILGWU during the early 1940s and was involved in the Liberal Party's
formation.32 Although there is little evidence that the Liberal Party had
more than a formal commitment to racial integration, even that was
unusual during the 1940s. Running African American women and men
for public office represented a clear and appealing departure from
politics as usual. Why Baker allied herself more with the Liberal Party
than the American Labor Party is unclear. The American Labor Party is
better known in progressive circles as a serious third-party experiment
that began in 1936 as a way for leftists to back President Franklin D.
Roosevelt without supporting the less progressive forces in the
Democratic Party. The party, founded by Dubinsky and other socialists
including Frank Crosswaith, began to splinter in 1939 over the HitlerStalin Pact and the American Communist Party's pragmatic support of
that agreement. Crosswaith and others then pushed to expel communists
from the American Labor Party, but the anticommunist faction ultimately
went its own way and formed the Liberal Party.33
Liberal-left coalition work took on new meanings during the postwar
period, when virulent anticommunism spread through the organized
labor movement, partisan politics, the U.S. government, and even the
civil rights movement. At the same time, the move away from inclusive
popular front politics and toward a more rigid sectarian agenda on the
part of the Communist Party only exacerbated the situation. Comfortable
alliances among people on the left who had divergent ideologies and
affiliations dissolved under the dual pressures. Some independent
socialists stood by current and former Communist Party members who
had organized alongside them, while others sought to distance
themselves from this increasingly suspect and stigmatized group by
denouncing their former co-workers and, in some cases, “naming names”
to government investigators to absolve themselves.34 A few Americans
refused to be intimidated, defending civil liberties and deploring
McCarthyism. Many progressives, however, were silenced by fear and
confusion, failing to fully appreciate the far-reaching dangers of the
House Un-American Activities Committee's witch-hunts or, on the other
hand, understanding the dangers quite clearly and wanting to spare
themselves by pointing a finger at others.35
David Dubinsky and the Liberal Party openly espoused
anticommunism. According to the historian Paul Buhle, Dubinsky
became “fanatically anti-Communist,”36 and the Liberal Party eventually
followed his lead. Some members collaborated with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to prosecute their communist
counterparts within the United States, while simultaneously working
with the cia to undermine communist influence abroad. Baker would
have certainly been aware of these politics, and the fact that she worked
closely with the Liberal Party in spite of its undemocratic politics is
wholly inconsistent with the views and values she articulated a decade
later. It may be that her brief association with the Liberal Party should
just be seen as yet another curious example of her eclectic and
sometimes unusual political ties.
Although Baker's own relationship with the Communist Party was an
ambivalent one, she never collaborated with government agencies to
persecute alleged communists. Ironically, throughout the 1950s, even as
she positioned herself squarely among the noncommunists, if not the
anticommunists, Baker was being kept under heavy surveillance by the
FBI as a potential subversive. Informants called her home and office
under false pretenses to obtain information. Her apartment was watched,
her phone bill intercepted, and her bank account monitored.37
In the late 1950s, Baker cooperated, however reluctantly, with NAACP
officials when the national organization began to purge communists from
the organization. The 1950 decision to exclude communists on the
national level was implemented by Baker's old friend J. M. Tinsley, who
headed the Committee on Political Domination, the goal of which was to
end alleged communist infiltration of the organization.38 In September
1957, while serving on the executive committee of the New York branch,
Baker was asked to serve on the newly established Internal Security
Committee, headed by her former Liberal Party running mate, Rev.
James Robinson. The committee met on October 14 at Morningside
Community Center on West 122d Street and drafted its mission
statement and its report to the branch. Although the two-page report
began with the unconvincing disclaimer that it was “not a ‘witch hunt’
committee but a ‘watch dog’ committee,” it proceeded to lay out a rather
rigid set of criteria for membership in the branch. “No individual having
any affiliation with communists within the past fifteen years should be
allowed on the Executive Board,” the report stated. Any nominee for the
executive board would be required to provide a “written and signed
statement listing all past and present affiliations,” and if “any officer or
member is discovered to have any connection with communism within
the past 13 years [15 years stated elsewhere], or to be presently so
connected, they shall be expelled from the organization.”39
The most public ouster was that of former Harlem city councilman
Ben Davis Jr., an attorney and a well-known member of the Communist
Party who had served time in jail under the Smith Act; his membership
fee was returned by the branch president along with a terse letter
“condemning atheistic communism.”40 Other New York City branch
members were quietly coerced to resign under threat of a possible
committee investigation. Baker must have felt enormously torn by this
decision since it was at variance with the personal choices she made.
Around the time that she served on the NAACP committee to weed out
communists, she befriended Anne Braden and Annie Stein, two reputed
communists who were also militant antiracist whites and very principled
people. In the case of Braden, Baker provided moral and political
support, defending Anne and her husband Carl against the kind of
persecution that the NAACP itself was replicating on a small scale within
the organization. Looking back on her role in the NAACP's Internal
Security Committee years later, after the most reactionary implications
of McCarthyism had played themselves out, Baker confided to her friend
Joanne Grant: “I followed a national office directive to the letter, and I
should not have.”41 After her involvement with the Internal Security
Committee, political independence became even more critical to Ella
Baker.
During the postwar years and after she left the NAACP's national office,
Baker was searching for a political home, an organization that embraced
a radical and egalitarian practice and vision similar to her own, but she
had clearly not yet found it. Finding that political community may have
taken on even greater importance to Ella Baker after the death of her
beloved mother, Anna Ross Baker, in December 1954. Littleton, North
Carolina, the family homestead, and Anna Baker's presence there had
been anchoring forces in Ella's otherwise fairly nomadic existence.
During her travels for the black cooperative movement in the 1930s and
her town-by-town organizing crusades on behalf of the NAACP in the
1940s, her mother's house had been a place for respite and recouping her
energy. The house was still there, but gone from it was the woman who
had nurtured her early intellectual and political consciousness, toughened
her up for the world, and consoled her when that world was unkind.
Baker took the long train ride home to attend her mother's funeral and
put her affairs in order. She returned north soon thereafter to her second
home in Harlem with a renewed resolve to carry on the work that her
mother had inspired her to embark on many decades before. A critical
component of that work was building political bridges between struggles
in the North and the front line struggles in the South. One such bridge
was the New York-based fundraising organization, In Friendship.
In Friendship was formed as a way to funnel resources to the activists
who had launched and sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which
began in December 1955. Only a few months before, the brutal murder
of young Emmett Till by white vigilantes in the Mississippi Delta had
galvanized national attention and black anger. These two events—new
forms of resistance coupled with the continuance of racial violence—
symbolized the promise and the perils facing southern blacks in the
1950s.
Montgomery activist Joanne Gibson Robinson and the Women's
Political Council, as well as E. D. Nixon and the local NAACP, had been
looking for ways to fight back effectively against the humiliating
treatment of Montgomery's black residents on city busses for some time.
On December 5, 1955, NAACP activist Rosa Parks gave them that longawaited opportunity. In her own personal protest, pregnant with political
consequences that she was well aware of, Parks refused to comply with
the orders of the white bus driver that she relinquish her seat to a white
passenger as required by local law. Parks' arrest triggered a yearlong
boycott of city busses, resulting in desegregation of those buses and
catapulting young Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence as the
eloquent and courageous leader of the protest.
While most eyes were fixed on the emergence of a new leader at the
apex of the movement, Baker was more concerned with the base. She
viewed the Montgomery boycott as an amazing event, “unpredicted,
where thousands of individuals, just black ordinary people, subjected
themselves to inconveniences that were certainly beyond the thinking of
most folk… . This meant you had a momentum that had not been seen,
even in the work of the NAACP. And it was something that suggested the
potential for widespread action throughout the South.”42 This example of
commitment and resolve on the part of the rank and file provided an
opportunity for progressive organizers like Ella Baker.
Baker's close ties with Montgomery's grassroots leaders Parks and
Nixon drew her attention to the struggle right from the start. When the
implications of the Montgomery Bus Boycott became clear to the nation,
Baker quickly began to look for ways she could mobilize support for the
protesters and help sustain their militant, direct action movement. In
1956, while still deeply immersed in local issues in New York, Baker
and other northern civil rights activists began to discuss the need to
establish a northern-based fund-raising organization that would be
independent of other organizational agendas and could maximize its aid
to those who were hardest hit by reprisals for their civil rights activism.
In Friendship was founded as a result.
Ella Baker and two of her closest political allies at the time, Stanley
Levison and Bayard Rustin, were the core organizers of In Friendship,
which included representatives from various labor, religious, and
political groups based in the city.43 Levison was a wealthy Jewish lawyer
and businessman who had been, at one time, affiliated with the
Communist Party in New York, which made him a lifelong target of FBI
surveillance. He and Baker met while working against the McCarran Act
in the early 1950s. In fact, Baker had once shared a platform with
Eleanor Roosevelt at an anti-McCarthy program organized by Levison.44
The McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 required alleged
communists to register with the attorney general, and the McCarranWalter Immigration Act of 1952 denied entry to the U.S. of any
immigrant with communist beliefs or affiliations.45 W. E. B. Du Bois and
Paul Robeson were but two of many prominent activists and dissident
intellectuals who were thereby affected. Eleanor Roosevelt and other
Cold War liberals saw themselves as both anti-McCarthyites and still
devoutly anticommunist. As Carol Polsgrove writes, they hated
McCarthy because he “was giving anti-communism a bad name.”46 So,
there was no contradiction in their minds between purging communists
from their organizations and opposing what they viewed as extremist
practices initiated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and continued by the
House Un-American Activities Committee after his censure by the
Senate in 1954.
Bayard Rustin was a black Quaker from Pennsylvania with an eclectic
political past and a passion for social justice. He was also a bit of an
eccentric. He joined the Young Communist League briefly during the
Great Depression and later broke with the group to work with the more
moderate Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR).
Rustin was gay long before there was a gay rights movement, at a
time when such sexual choices, if made public, could and often did result
in severe personal and political penalties.47 So, he was not only at risk of
attacks from southern segregationists for his antiracism activity, but he
was also vulnerable to prejudice from within the movement because of
his sexual orientation.
Ella Baker knew Rustin was gay and seemingly accepted him without
condition, later reflecting that his homosexuality may have been one of
the reasons that he opted to keep a low public profile during his long,
active political career in a wide range of organizations and campaigns.
This strategy was probably not much of a choice, considering the extent
of homophobia and his colleagues' fear that his sexual orientation might
draw negative attention and damage their cause. One historian of the
civil rights movement describes Rustin this way: “An internationally
respected pacifist, as well as a vagabond minstrel, penniless world
traveler, sophisticated collector of African and pre-Colombian art, and a
bohemian Greenwich Village philosopher… . he lived more or less a
hobo's life, committed to the ideals of world peace and racial
brotherhood… . [He was] tall and bony, handsome and conspiratorial,
full of ideas that spilled out in a high pitched voice, and a proud but
squeaky West Indian accent.”48
Baker, Levison, and Rustin were an unlikely threesome in many
respects, but their ideas and political passions drew them together and
enabled them to become comrades and friends. Their close collaboration
continued for a number of years, although their friendship was tried,
tested, and eventually weakened over the course of the next decade.
Baker was an important catalyst for pulling together the individuals
and organizations that comprised the In Friendship coalition in 1956.
Among them were dozens of individuals whom Baker had known or
worked with in other campaigns and projects over the years. They
included Walter Petersen, a leader of the New York chapter of the
Liberal Party; Levison, a member of the American Jewish Congress; and
Rev. Thomas Kilgore, the minister at Baker's own Friendship Baptist
Church in Harlem. Other Baker associates were active in supporting In
Friendship: Fay Bennett of the National Sharecroppers Fund; Rae
Brandstein of the National Committee for Rural Schools; Cleveland
Robinson of the AFL-CIO, District 65; and Norman Thomas, the Socialist
Party leader. Ella Baker served as executive secretary of the group, and
A. Philip Randolph was persuaded to chair the new coalition for its first
two months. The Socialist-affiliated Worker's Defense League, led by
Thomas, provided temporary office space. Initially, Baker's position was
unpaid, but she managed the office, handled correspondence and
bookkeeping, orchestrated publicity and outreach, and did virtually all of
the tasks necessary to keep the organization afloat. The group was
eventually able to piece together a modest salary for her.
On February 29, 1956, In Friendship launched its inaugural fundraising campaign with an “Action Conference” held at the McAlpin
Hotel on Broadway and 34th Street in Manhattan. Randolph had issued
the call for the conference in a letter, dated February 17, that conveyed a
sense of urgency about the situation in the South: “Reports from
Mississippi indicate that the white Citizens Councils have succeeded in
choking off all sources of loans and other credits on which [black]
farmers depend. We must show that those who are being attacked do not
stand alone in their fight for decency.”49 He noted in passing the
occurrence of a similar conference being convened in Washington D.C.
by Oscar Lee and Roy Wilkins. Randolph commented casually that the
event would “add impetus to our work in this area,” glossing over the
competition implicit in the simultaneous formation of two organizations
to serve the same purpose.50
Despite the strong commitment and good intentions of its founders, In
Friendship had difficulties getting off the ground. Randolph abruptly
resigned as chairman of the organization shortly after its formation and
before the New York fund-raiser even took place. He claimed that he was
overextended in his obligations and felt it inappropriate that he solicit
funds on behalf of In Friendship, since he had already done so recently
on behalf of other organizations. It is possible that something else may
have prompted Randolph's action, since he was well aware of the
existence of competing organizations from the outset, as indicated by his
February 17 letter. Perhaps he was persuaded by colleagues in more
established organizations to withdraw his support from the nascent
group, or perhaps he feared that such an endorsement could become a
political liability in his relationships with other groups. Since the initial
supporters of In Friendship believed that a roster of prominent sponsors
was necessary to give the group credibility, Randolph's resignation came
as a particularly sharp blow. In a March 8, 1956, letter to Randolph,
Norman Thomas pleaded with him to reconsider his decision, saying that
it would “almost wreck a pretty promising beginning at worthwhile
work.”51 Randolph resigned anyway. Perhaps in tribute to his longstanding friendship with and respect for Ella Baker, perhaps in order to
exert some control over the campaign, he continued to work with the
group after he stepped down as chair.
The founders of In Friendship were painfully aware of the
competition and tensions with preexisting civil rights organizations,
much of which arose from political turf battles and the clash of
overinflated egos. Since a number of organizations were already engaged
in similar efforts, the founders sought to avoid the appearance of
needless duplication. As Fay Bennett of the National Sharecroppers Fund
emphasized in a 1956 letter to Norman Thomas: “It should be made clear
at the beginning that the contemplated work of the committee [In
Friendship] will be handled through existing machinery and that its
primary purpose, at least in its initial stages, would be to stimulate efforts
on the part of other organizations to help those in the South who need
help and in other ways to make an impact on the situation.”52 Despite In
Friendship's attempts to avoid rivalry with other organizations, some
prominent civil rights figures were still reluctant to view the group as an
umbrella fund-raiser for the movement as a whole.
In the spring of 1956, three In Friendship leaders, including Baker,
worked nearly full time for six weeks building for a mammoth civil
rights rally that was held in Madison Square Garden in May. The other
principal sponsor for the event was Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porters. Leaders of In Friendship naturally assumed that they would
process all funds raised by the event, since they had formed the umbrella
organization meant to pull together everyone else's efforts in civil rights
activism. However, A. Philip Randolph had a different idea. As one of
the top union officials involved, he opted to set up a separate special
committee to direct, monitor, and dispense funds raised by the AFL-CIO.
The committee was to have two labor representatives, hand-picked by
the head of the AFL-CIO, George Meany; representatives from several
other organizations; and a single delegate from In Friendship. Although
In Friendship acquiesced to the decision, it was clearly a slap in the face,
given the organization's initiative in coordinating precisely the kind of
tasks to be handled by the new special committee. Nevertheless,
Randolph's powerful stature and the relative newness of In Friendship
prompted the group not to openly criticize or oppose the decision. In
fact, Ella Baker was at the July 11 meeting in Randolph's office when the
new formation was set up. Not wanting to be divisive at the expense of
the group's larger goals, she went along with Randolph's move,
conceding that it was “understandable that the unions were reluctant to
funnel moneys through an organization as young and untested as In
Friendship, and In Friendship would willingly participate as one member
of the larger committee.”53 The final insult was that the labor
representatives on the committee would have veto power over all
funding decisions, rendering the In Friendship forces fairly marginal to
the whole deliberative process. These events illustrate the internal
tensions, hierarchies, and competition for leadership that existed within
the early civil rights movement, even among its northern supporters.
The conflict between In Friendship and the union leaders also
illustrates the reluctance of established leaders to relinquish any of their
power to, or even make room for, upstart organizations. Baker
encountered this problem repeatedly over the years. National leaders, in
civil rights and other fields, were protective of their prominence and
status as the “official” spokespersons for their respective constituencies.
Baker was vividly impressed by the deleterious effects of such rivalries
and the stifling and coercive nature of the relationship between junior
and senior partners in coalitions. She carried these memories with her
into the political work she did in subsequent years. In particular, they
shaped her desire to be vehemently protective of the independence and
autonomy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when it
was founded a few years later. She defended the young militants' right to
make their own decisions, despite their youthful inexperience, in the face
of annexation attempts by some of Baker's well-established colleagues.
Difficulties and tensions with allies notwithstanding, the small core of
In Friendship supporters persevered and made some important
contributions. Randolph's resignation and his bid to control fund-raising
did not “wreck” the organization, as Thomas had feared. In December
1956, In Friendship hosted its second successful fund-raiser, a major
concert at the Manhattan Center featuring Coretta Scott King, Harry
Belafonte, Duke Ellington, and others to commemorate the first
anniversary of the Montgomery boycott. The event raised $1,800, an
appreciable sum at the time. Part of the proceeds went to support the
organizing efforts of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the
main community group that emerged from the boycott. Funds were also
set aside for other grassroots struggles as well. Specifically, In
Friendship provided funds to two groups of black tenant farmers who
were evicted from their plantations in Clarendon County, South Carolina,
and Yazoo, Mississippi, because of their involvement in civil rights
activities. The activists in these communities had tried to test the victory
of the 1954 Brown decision by enrolling their children in previously allwhite schools and had suffered harsh economic reprisals as a result.54
Civil rights campaigns in places like Yazoo and Clarendon County did
not receive the widespread news coverage that the Montgomery
campaign did, so the grassroots activists in these rural communities
lacked the margin of protection that national media attention and
sympathetic support from outsiders might have provided. Throughout the
South, civil rights activists who were poor, poorly educated, and
economically vulnerable were easy targets for retribution, for which they
often had no recourse. In Friendship provided assistance to the grassroots
leaders whom Ella Baker saw as the very backbone of the Black
Freedom Movement; they were likely, in her view, to be pivotal actors in
whatever struggles were to emerge in the years ahead.
Baker's concept of progressive leadership was leadership that helped
people to help themselves and allowed ordinary people to feel that they
could determine their own future. When she lent her energies to In
Friendship, her mission was grassroots empowerment, to tap and build
on the activist spirit that the Montgomery boycott had unleashed and to
nurture and encourage the emergence of strong indigenous leadership in
communities throughout the South. That mission was an extension of the
objectives she had worked toward in the NAACP during the 1940s. She
not only wanted In Friendship to provide funds to meet the material
needs of suffering families; she also wanted it to pay for local leaders to
attend conferences, meetings, and workshops, which would boost their
confidence as organizers and give them intellectual perspectives and
tactical ammunition for the struggles they were engaged in. In other
words, Baker believed in the adage that it is more important to teach
people to fish and farm than simply to give them food. The funds In
Friendship raised were, in Baker's view, leadership development funds,
not simply relief funds. For example, in the summer of 1956, while
attending the annual NAACP conference in San Francisco, she learned
about forty black farmers who were trying to form an agricultural
cooperative. Instead of providing a direct grant to the co-op, Baker
wanted the farmers to get a better sense of the scope and history of the
cooperative movement, so she arranged to have In Friendship pay for a
representative of the group, Orsey Malone, to attend a Cooperative
Institute being held at Bard College in New York later that year.55 Such
inclusive politics and broad objectives differentiated In Friendship from
a number of other support organizations.
In Friendship lasted officially for about three years and provided
much-needed resources to sustain activists on the front lines of the
southern battle against racism, but ultimately it could not sustain itself.
As the civil rights movement grew in visibility and importance, larger
organizations stepped in to offer funds, although sometimes with ulterior
motives and camouflaged agendas. But the start-up and survival funds
that In Friendship provided in the immediate wake of the Montgomery
boycott were crucial. Even before its demise, its three founders—Rustin,
Levison, and Baker—had begun to redirect their energies from fundraising to direct consultation with movement leaders in the South,
namely, Dr. King and the emergent Southern Christian Leadership
Conference.
From the very outset, Baker was thinking of ways she could get closer
to the action, confiding to her friend and pastor Rev. Kilgore that she was
literally “chafing at the bit to be down there as a part of the struggle.”56
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Baker was deeply engaged in
local political struggles in New York around issues near and dear to her
heart, but the new sparks of protest in Montgomery were too important
to ignore. That potential ultimately inspired her to return to the South
and resume the intense pace of organizing that had characterized her
years with the NAACP during the 1940s.
The decade of the 1950s was filled with ambivalence for Ella Baker
and many others. She was divided between North and South; between
her pragmatic side and her principles; and between her loyalty to old
colleagues and her devotion to and empathy with new friends.
6 THE PREACHER AND THE
ORGANIZER
THE POLITICS OF LEADERSHIP IN THE EARLY CIVIL
RIGHTS MOVEMENT
The Negro must quit looking for a savior, and work to save himself.
Ella Baker, 1947
Leadership never ascends from the pew to the pulpit, but… descends
from the pulpit to the pew.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1954
Ella Baker traveled to the South in January 1957, as a representative of
In Friendship, along with her colleague Bayard Rustin, to help organize
the founding meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC), an organization that sought to spread across the South the seeds
of rebellion that had germinated in Montgomery. Baker was deeply
committed to that goal, yet right from the start she had serious
reservations about the way in which SCLC was organized and how it
approached the task of propagating the movement.
Baker welcomed the political developments that occurred in
Montgomery in 1955-56 as the beginning of what she hoped would
become a new wave of activism for black freedom based on a strategy of
grassroots mass mobilization. She had learned from her work with the
NAACP, both in the South and in Harlem, that any viable social change
organization had to be built from the bottom up. “Authentic” leadership
could not come from the outside or above; rather, the people who were
most oppressed had to take direct action to change their circumstances.
At best, national organizations could offer activists the resources that
they lacked: financial support, media attention, and political education.
During her years as a field organizer for the NAACP, Baker had realized—
as the national leadership consistently did not—that the branches were
the essence of the organization's strength. Although the NAACP had been
founded in the early twentieth century by northern social reformers and
intellectuals, since World War II it had been transformed into a
membership organization under whose name activists organized locally
in cities and small towns across the South, as well as in northern cities
whose black populations were swelling as the Great Migration
continued. The national NAACP's persistent inability, or determined
refusal, to reinvent itself in the image of its changing mass base was at
the core of Baker's frustration with the organization throughout the late
1940s and early 1950s.
The new black freedom struggle that had ignited a spark in the South
in the mid-1950s had the potential to fulfill Baker's ideal of a truly
democratic organization. The Montgomery boycott began not with a
convention of prominent race leaders, as the NAACP had, but because
masses of ordinary people had gotten in motion. Veteran NAACP organizer
Rosa Parks initiated a calculated protest action on her own, and a small
network of activists followed up with phone calls and leaflets to
publicize what she was doing. Those with official leadership status were
then called on to convene a meeting to plan a more organized response.
Women, who Baker believed were the “backbone” of the movement,
were critical actors. Joanne Gibson Robinson of the Women's Political
Council had helped launch the boycott, and black domestic workers,
many of whom walked long distances to work to support the protest, had
been indispensable. Baker believed that the most effective leaders were
ones who emerged directly out of struggle. She was delighted that
instead of working through the NAACP, which eschewed mass action,
Montgomery's activists formed a new, autonomous, and democratic
organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).1
In 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court declared enforced segregation on
public busses to be unconstitutional; it thereby delivered a high-profile
victory to the Montgomery struggle and gave high-profile status to its
most eloquent spokesman, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ella Baker was
most impressed with the rank-and-file activism that had emerged during
the bus boycott, and she worked to provide moral support and material
assistance to those involved. The eyes of the world, however, were
focused on Martin Luther King Jr., the eloquent young minister who had
become the leading spokesperson for the campaign. Baker's initial
impressions of King were positive. She recounted to an interviewer
decades later that the first time she heard King speak, she was literally
“carried away.”2 He was earnest and articulate, and he struck Baker as
less pompous than some of the ministers she had encountered.3 Baker
knew that King came from a prominent family in Atlanta and could have
followed in his father's footsteps rather than taking the risks that political
activism entailed. She respected him for choosing a different path and
trying to make a contribution to the movement. At the same time, King's
sudden fame did not sit right with Baker, especially given his youth and
inexperience. Moreover, he did not seem to want to learn about the
process of organizing, at least not from her.
Seasoned political veterans like Ella Baker, many of whom moved in
and out of organizations and coalitions depending on existing
opportunities and pragmatic tactical considerations, were used to
navigating personalities and negotiating ideological differences.
However, as her relationship with King and SCLC wore on, issues of
organization and leadership took on heightened significance in Baker's
mind. In the historiography of the modern Black Freedom Movement,
scholars have drawn a line between charismatic leadership models and
grassroots activist ones, with a parallel distinction made between
mobilizing (for big events) and actually organizing communities to feel
empowered to assess their own needs and fight their own battles.4 The
tensions between these two models of movement building were apparent
in Montgomery during the boycott, and they persisted in SCLC as it
evolved. Still, Baker was willing to devote herself to the organization, its
limitations notwithstanding, to see what could be accomplished. She was
even willing to serve as a provisional, rather than permanent, member of
the SCLC staff. Her conflicted relationship with Martin Luther King Jr.
turned on such questions as leadership and organization, especially the
proper roles of national spokespersons and local participants in massbased struggles. Baker's involvement in SCLC was, from its inception,
shaped by pervasive tensions and fundamental contradictions.
FORMING THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN
LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE
In the wake of the victory in Montgomery, an informal network of
activist ministers began to take shape. Some had carried out similar
protests on a smaller scale in their home states, such as T. J. Jemison in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Many others had been in touch with King
during and after the boycott, as events in Montgomery attracted media
attention. Baker had developed her own contacts with the new crop of
southern activists through In Friendship, adding to the independent
network of militant NAACP organizers she had maintained since the
previous decade. Most of these activists felt greater loyalty to their local
struggles and to itinerant organizers like Baker than to any single
national or regional organization. The problem facing King, Baker, and
other civil rights organizers was that there was no formal organization,
national or regional, that could link these various individuals and
disparate local groups together and sustain and extend the movement
after the Montgomery boycott ended in December 1956.
The idea for a regionwide organization like SCLC germinated in
different quarters simultaneously. As Baker herself understood, this idea
could not have been traced directly to a single source. Naturally, King
and his ministerial colleagues in the South were strategizing about what
their next steps should be and how to coordinate their efforts. But they
were not the only ones having such conversations. By some accounts, the
trio that directed In Friendship laid out a blueprint for SCLC in a series of
intense late-night conversations in New York. According to Adam
Fairclough, “SCLC might not have come into being but for the political
foresight of three northern radicals: Bayard Rustin, Stanley David
Levison, and Ella Jo Baker.”5 Baker recalled that she and her two New
York colleagues spent many hours discussing ways that movement
leaders might “enlarge upon the gains of the Montgomery bus boycott.”6
Rustin and Levison relayed the content of those discussions to King and
other ministers involved in the southern civil rights movement, urging
them to call a regional meeting to discuss the idea further.7 These various
efforts gave birth to SCLC. Certainly, activists in Alabama and Georgia
did not need New York “experts” to tell them how to mobilize a
campaign. Nevertheless, these connections underline the fact that the
civil rights movement was not organized in isolation from veteran
activists such as Baker, Levinson, and Rustin, whose long histories in
other progressive struggles dated back to the 1930s.
During the months leading up to and following the victory in
Montgomery, Bayard Rustin and Stanley David Levison had become two
of Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest advisers. They helped garner
important resources for MIA and SCLC and offered tactical and strategic
advice, earning them King's trust and friendship. Neither Rustin nor
Levison played a very public role, but both were in King's inner circle of
confidantes. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, their close friend Ella
Baker was not. She was certainly as politically sophisticated, articulate,
and astute as her male counterparts, and she had twenty years of political
experience in the South as well as the North. Yet King kept Baker at
arm's length and never treated her as a political or intellectual peer. As
Baker later put it: “After all, who was I? I was female, I was old. I didn't
have any Ph.D.”8 Furthermore, she explained, she was “not loathe to
raise questions. I did not just subscribe to a theory just because it came
out of the mouth of the leader.”9 She “was not the kind of person that
made special effort to be ingratiating.”10 She was well aware, by the
mid-1950s, that her forthrightness in the face of authority carried a
certain price, limiting her acceptance by those in positions of official
power, but it was a price she was willing to pay in order to think and act
according to her conscience.
Baker speculated that Levison's influence over King stemmed from
his capacity to raise money and tap resources and that Rustin was most
adept at helping King to hone his ideas and garner greater publicity.
Baker concluded cynically that “persons who were in a position to
provide both financial aid and public relations assistance to the
furtherance of the organization or the furtherance of the career of the
president [of SCLC] would be certainly high on the list of acceptable
advisors.”11 Rustin and Levison were both great admirers of King, and
they were as eager to see him ascend as the leader of the movement as
they were to see the movement itself grow. They differed with Baker in
this respect. In all fairness, King's relationship with Rustin and Levison
does not appear to have been as pragmatic and opportunistic as Baker's
comments implied. There was an intellectual and philosophical bond and
seemingly genuine camaraderie among the three men. Simply put, it was
probably King's sexist attitudes toward women, at least in part, that
prevented him from having the same kind of collegial relationship with
Baker.12
The founding meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference took place in Atlanta at Dr. Martin Luther King Sr.'s
Ebenezer Baptist Church on January 10, 1957. Ministers from nearly a
dozen southern states gathered under the banner of the Southern
Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration.
Ella Baker worked with Bayard Rustin to draft statements that framed
the issues and set the agenda for the meeting.13 The new organization
was planned from the outset to be a loosely structured coalition linking
church-based leaders in civil rights struggles across the South. It was
decidedly not a membership organization so as not to appear to compete
with the NAACP, which may have initially taken the edge off the rivalry,
but did not eliminate it.
Just as the group was convening, the seriousness of their undertaking
was driven home by a night of violent attacks in Montgomery, targeting
leaders of the new organization. The home of Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a
leader of the boycott who was a close colleague of King, was firebombed
while his wife, Juanita, and their young daughter were inside;
fortunately, no one was seriously hurt. While Abernathy was on the
phone with his wife, several other explosions rocked the city, hitting
churches and the home of Rev. Robert S. Graetz, a white MIA supporter.
Abernathy immediately left Atlanta for Montgomery. A sober
determination informed the remainder of the discussions held that
weekend.
By the meeting's conclusion, the group decided to emphasize
nonviolence as a means of bringing about social progress and racial
justice for southern blacks; the new organization would rely on the
southern black church for its base of support.14 The strength of SCLC
rested on the political activities of its local church affiliates. By giving
church activists a sense of connection to one another and by infusing an
explicitly political message into the black theology of the 1950s, SCLC
envisioned itself as the “political arm of the black church,” according to
the sociologist Aldon Morris.15 However they viewed themselves, King
and his colleagues represented an activist minority within the politically
heterogeneous black church. The majority of black ministers in the
1950s still opted for a safer, less confrontational political path. This was
especially true in the climate of the 1950s when any form of dissent was
equated with communism and social, if not legal, sanctions were
possible.
Despite their embrace of activism, King and the SCLC ministers still
defined their political goals squarely within the respectable American
mainstream and were cautious about any leftist associations.16 This was
conscious and strategic. They wanted to pose a challenge to white
America: “We are law-abiding, God-fearing citizens, now give us our
rights.” King's stance would change as he and the movement evolved
over the ensuing years.17
The Atlanta group met as the Southern Leadership Conference on
Transportation and Nonviolent Integration; it later changed its name to
the Southern Christian leadership Conference. The choice of the new
organization's name is a subtle indicator of the Cold War ethos that
permeated black politics, as it did white society, during the 1950s. The
decision to include Christian in the group's name was not simply an
affirmation of people's faith that God was on their side but also a
conscious effort to deflect any allegations of communist infiltration or
influence, since the materialist worldview of communists meant that they
were assumed to be atheists.18
The cultivated image of a “good citizen”—elegantly clad, well
spoken, and generally well educated—was an important marker of
respectability for the ministerial leaders that came together to form SCLC.
Once it was decided that the new coalition would be an extension of the
church, a patriarchal ethos took over. Neither Rosa Parks nor Joanne
Gibson Robinson nor any of the women who had sacrificed so much to
ensure the Montgomery boycott's success were invited to play a
leadership role in the new organization. Daisy Bates was eventually
given a nominal seat on the board, but, according to Baker, she never
was very active. Baker felt that her own involvement was tolerated more
than it was appreciated. “Someone's got to run the mimeographing
machine,” she later observed, only half-joking.19
The founders of SCLC were concerned primarily, but not exclusively,
about access to the ballot box and dignified treatment in public
accommodations. But theirs was a world apart from the lives of destitute
sharecroppers and their families who constituted a considerable portion
of the South's black population—people who could barely afford the fare
to ride on public transportation even after desegregation. It was this
group that Baker worried most about. After she left Atlanta on January
11, she spent the next five days traveling around rural Mississippi
meeting and talking with landless and unemployed black farmers about
the painful conditions of their lives. She stayed with Amzie and Ruth
Moore and kept a careful journal of the families she met, what their
names were, how they lived, how many children they had. This heartwrenching reconnaissance effort was an attempt to identify families in
need of In Friendship's support. Baker soon realized that In Friendship
would be hard pressed to make a real distinction between families who
were victims of political reprisals and those who were victims of
economic violence, pure and simple, since such violence saturated the
social and political landscape of the rural South.20 They resigned
themselves to provide aid wherever they could without trying to discern
whether the need was purely economic or primarily a result of political
activity.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference first stepped on the
national political stage as an organization at the Prayer Pilgrimage for
Freedom held at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on May 17,
1957, the third anniversary of the Brown decision. And Ella Baker was
once again instrumental in pulling off a successful large-scale event. Roy
Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr., and A. Philip Randolph were co-chairs
of the pilgrimage, which was intended to expose to the nation the crime
of racial injustice. Organizers billed it “as a protest to the bombings and
violence in the South.”21 As the planning began, there were palpable
tensions between the NAACP and the newly formed SCLC, which the
association's national leaders saw as a rival attempting to duplicate or
interfere with its ongoing, successful work for civil rights. Once again,
the esteemed labor leader A. Philip Randolph served as peacemaker,
bringing Wilkins, the head of the NAACP and Ella Baker's longtime friend
and former colleague, to join him and King on a three-man leadership
committee for the pilgrimage. Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin were the
two staff organizers for the event, coordinating communications and
doing the day-to-day logistical work necessary to plan the gathering.
The patriotic and religious tenor of the event underscored SCLC's
mainstream political orientation. The slogans and statements surrounding
the demonstration were carefully selected to present an image of the
resurgent civil rights movement as respectable and nonthreatening.
Anticommunism was so pervasive that any type of protest was
immediately vulnerable to red-baiting. The NAACP had already caved in
to these pressures by establishing a formal policy of exclusion.
According to an FBI informant who was surreptitiously spying on her,
Baker was indeed worried that certain individuals in New York were
trying to “stack the delegation with communists.”22 After the event,
Rustin and Baker responded defensively to allegations of communist
participation. Their response to an Amsterdam News article did not even
entertain the possibility that such exclusion might be unfair. Rustin and
Baker cited a copy of the call for the pilgrimage to the press, tacitly
endorsing its Cold War politics: “The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom
will be a spiritual assembly, primarily by the Negro clergy, and the
NAACP. In such an assembly, there will be no place for the irreligious… .
No communists have been or will be invited to participate in the program
either as a speaker, singer, prayer leader, or scripture leader… . The
Official Call, issued on April 5, 1957, invites all who love justice and
dignity and liberty, who love their country, to join in a Prayer Pilgrimage
to Washington on May 17, 1957.”23
The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom drew a crowd of between 25,000
and 30,000 to the Lincoln Memorial.24 It is difficult to quantify the
success of such campaigns. However, President Eisenhower did accede
to a request that he meet with civil rights leaders soon thereafter, and the
rather tepid Civil Rights Act of 1957 was signed into law in August,
eventually putting into place a Civil Rights Commission, which was
authorized to review and investigate voting rights abuses.
Ella Baker's work as one of the two staff organizers for the pilgrimage
is a graphic illustration of her ability to straddle organizational divides,
deliberately ignoring and minimizing rivalries and ideological battles
that sometimes raged all around her. Even though she was still on the
payroll of In Friendship, which had close ties to SCLC, she worked out of
the NAACPnational office on 40th Street in New York. And while she
worked in the same office with her old colleague Roy Wilkins, who
could barely contain his hostility and resentment toward King, she would
only six months later, without seemingly missing a beat or proffering an
explanation, accept an offer to work with King's organization in Atlanta
on a full-time basis. Essentially, Baker refused to take sides: when there
were no fundamental principles at stake, she did not take territorial
claims or ego wounds too seriously—instead she seemed to almost float
above it all. She indeed had criticisms of both SCLC and the NAACP and of
both King and Wilkins. At any given moment as the flurry of activities in
the late 1950s was about to feed into the frenetic pace of the 1960s,
Baker's organizational affiliations were often unclear. Having been
instrumental in the founding of SCLC in January 1957, Baker remained
active in the New York NAACP branch and school reform struggle led by
Parents in Action and other New York-based groups unaffiliated with the
NAACP like In Friendship. It was all a part of the same drama in Ella
Baker's mind, with different characters (all of them slightly flawed)
engaged in different plots and subplots, but they were performing on the
same political stage and had to coordinate with one another. She was
clearly in the mind-set of building a movement rather than any one
organization.
After the pilgrimage, Baker returned to New York, where she, Rustin,
and Levison continued to discuss ways of sustaining the momentum of
protests in the South. Following a few months of floundering, SCLC
decided to launch its own independent campaign, the Crusade for
Citizenship, a regionwide voting rights project they scheduled to kick off
in February 1958. Hoping to capitalize on the passage of the Civil Rights
Act of 1957, SCLC leaders planned a sustained mobilization that would
gain national attention for voting rights and for the embryonic
organization. The goal of the Crusade for Citizenship was to double the
number of black voters in the South and to “challenge blacks to take on
the responsibilities of fighting for their rights.”25 The campaign's
letterhead proclaimed that “the franchise is a citizen's right … not a
privilege.”26 Designed to put black voter rights on the national political
agenda, the campaign was also meant to simultaneously mobilize masses
of ordinary African Americans against Jim Crow. For a brand-new civil
rights organization, the project was breathtakingly ambitious in its scope,
although still relatively moderate in the political tack and tone it took.
The leaders of SCLC had crafted the concept of a new campaign, but
the organization had no infrastructure, including the material and human
resources necessary to move a campaign forward. By January 1958,
Rustin and Levison realized that SCLC's plans for the new crusade were in
serious trouble, and they doubted that the group had the personnel and
tactical know-how to actually make it happen. The campaign was
scheduled to start on February 12, Abraham Lincoln's birthday. The kickoff had already been delayed once because plans were not in place, so
this date was firm. But SCLC desperately needed to bring someone on
board who had the political sophistication and organizational abilities
required to make the necessary arrangements in a very short period of
time. Levison and Rustin immediately thought of Ella Baker. Baker
certainly had the requisite skills and experience, and she was available.
She had separated from her husband, Bob, and her niece, Jackie, was
almost nineteen, so, as she later put it, she did not have “any
encumbrances” to prevent her from taking on this challenge.27
There had been some discussion about the possibility of having
Bayard Rustin serve as the executive director of SCLC. After all, he knew
the organization, had worked closely with King since the Montgomery
bus boycott, could bring considerable organizing experience to the task,
and certainly had the commitment. However, given his sexual orientation
and the social conservatism and homophobia of the church leaders he
would be working closely with, which was compounded by the narrowminded snobbery of Atlanta's black middle class, he was not a tenable
candidate for the job.28 In retrospect, Baker explained that “Bayard was
not prepared, nor could his lifestyle have stood the test of going down
there and being the person from up here to stay in Atlanta and help to get
things going, because Atlanta had not reached that point where a certain
lifestyle was accepted.”29 This remark hints at how Baker may have felt
about Rustin's homosexuality. She always chose her words and deployed
her language carefully. By describing the attitudes of black Atlantans as
not having reached a certain point of acceptance, she implied that she
had reached that point and that others should do so as well. She could
have described Rustin's behavior in a negative light or as a flaw or
weakness in an otherwise good character, as many of his other friends
and contemporaries did, but she did not.
Rustin and Levison agreed that Baker would be the ideal person to
organize the Crusade for Citizenship. She had built up a network of
contacts throughout the South through her work as a field organizer for
the NAACP.30 She had the political know-how and social skills to work
with all types of people, from proper, middle-class church members to
uneducated sharecroppers. Perhaps most significantly, Baker was a
skilled organizer and was well connected. These talents were exactly
what SCLC needed to pull off the Crusade for Citizenship within the tight
timeline that had been projected.
Levison and Rustin persuaded King to hire Baker as SCLC's first fulltime staff member. The three men met at New York's La Guardia Airport
while King was on a travel layover.31 King was initially reluctant to hire
Baker, because he had a different profile of the type of person who
should share the leadership role with him at the helm of the coalition.
King indicated that he did not personally believe that the director had to
be a minister, but he recognized that many of his clerical colleagues
strongly held that conviction. Of course, choosing a minister also meant
that the director must be a man. These preferences notwithstanding, there
were few other options at that juncture, and King's two advisers were
adamant.
King agreed to hire Baker on a temporary basis, until a more suitable
permanent director could be found. She was hired not as a field organizer
to work with grassroots activists but as the primary—and sometimes the
only—staff member for a fragile and sometimes fractious coalition of
clergymen led by Martin Luther King Jr. It was not an ideal arrangement.
Still, Rustin and Levison could not imagine that Baker would say no, so
they did not bother to discuss the particulars with her before making the
pitch to King that she be hired. Ultimately, they were right. But Baker
did not like the idea of anyone making decisions for her, even friends
who knew her as well as Levison and Rustin did: “To be drafted in the
sense of having it be said that I would go when I hadn't been consulted
… I suppose in that aspect of it, my ego is easily touched; not to ask me
what to do but to designate me to do something without even consulting
me.” The situation, it seemed to her, “was a bit presumptuous” and
insulting.32
The way in which Baker was recruited to work for SCLC was oddly
reminiscent of her sudden and surprising appointment as the NAACP's
director of branches in 1943. Nevertheless, she accepted the job with
King's organization, just as she had accepted Walter White's unilateral
decision to promote her in 1943. She agreed to join the SCLC staff
because, for her, politics were more important than protocol. She felt
strongly that the movement was at a critical crossroads; there was a lot at
stake—or at least great potential. While Baker did not appreciate the way
in which she was asked to go to Atlanta, she was thrilled by the
opportunity to get closer to the action. So, she packed her bags and
headed south for what she thought would be another short-term stint, but
which turned out to be a much more extended one.
Ella Baker arrived in Atlanta in mid-January 1958, seven months after
the Prayer Pilgrimage, to begin her work at SCLC headquarters. But the
organization had a headquarters in name only. When Baker arrived there
was no office, no phone, and no other staff. “I had to function out of a
telephone booth and my pocketbook,” she recalled.33 “Nobody had made
any provisions for space, hadn't even thought about it… . I had assumed
that certainly we might have been able to function with some degree of
sustained effort out of the church office of Ebenezer Baptist Church
since the Rev. Dr. King, Sr. was the father of the Rev. Dr. King, Jr., but
this was not provided for in the full sense.”34 Baker had to use the
mimeograph machine and other office equipment at the church in the
evening, after the regular office staff had gone home. It was a frustrating
situation, and her ties with other Atlanta activists were all that kept her
sane. Eventually, Rev. Samuel Williams, another minister affiliated with
SCLC, secured office space on Auburn Avenue, and Baker purchased
enough furniture and supplies to set up shop. This modest headquarters
became the permanent home of the new organization.
Baker knew her position with SCLC would be a challenge. When she
uprooted herself from her home in New York and migrated to the South
in the winter of 1958, she was guardedly optimistic about the new
organization. Given the broad-based support that had been mobilized
around the bus boycott, Baker hoped that SCLC would be able to
galvanize the aspirations of the masses of African American people and
ignite the kind of movement that would empower them to transform their
lives, their communities, and the nation. Yet she knew from the outset
that the philosophy, structure, and leadership of SCLC would be
problematic for her, and she suspected that ultimately the new
organization might itself become a barrier to carrying out the localized,
broad-based work that she envisioned.
Baker worked feverishly from mid-January to February 12 to make
the ambitiously conceived Crusade for Citizenship a relative success.
She tried to infuse it with her own political meanings and recapture the
spirit of rank-and-file activism that had defined the earlier boycott. Some
time later, in a report to SCLC's Administrative Committee, Baker
secularized the term, insisting that “the word crusade connotes, for me, a
vigorous movement, with high purpose and involving masses of
people.”35
Events were scheduled to kick off in twenty-one cities on the same
day. Baker wrote letters, flyers, and press releases to promote these
events. She made extensive phone calls to build support for the
campaign, identify and coordinate activities, and make sure all the
necessary logistics were in place. Within a few weeks she had a roster of
speakers lined up for the rallies, including a few prominent national
leaders such as Adam Clayton Powell Jr.36 Securing Powell's support
was particularly important, since some other national leaders were
reluctant to affiliate openly with SCLC. Taylor Branch, one of King's
biographers, points out that such key national figures as Lester Granger
and Ralph Bunche declined to endorse the Crusade for Citizenship
campaign because they wanted to remain nonpartisan in what appeared
to be, and in fact was, a rivalry between the SCLC and the NAACP.37
The Crusade for Citizenship was a pivotal test for the new coalition,
the first major regionwide campaign for which it sought to obtain
national support and public attention. Initially, SCLC had been very
careful to avoid stepping on the political toes of other organizations,
most notably the NAACP. The Prayer Pilgrimage was a single event in
which SCLC shared the spotlight with the NAACP and organized labor. In
contrast, the crusade was being launched by SCLC and its local affiliates
and was planned as a sustained mobilization. With this campaign, the
embryonic SCLC began to encroach upon the turf of established civil
rights groups.
The hard work that went into launching the Crusade for Citizenship
paid off, although not to the degree that Baker or her SCLC colleagues had
hoped. Ironically, even though the crusade went forward without the
NAACP's official endorsement or practical support, it was Ella Baker's
NAACP contacts in cities and towns throughout the South who helped her
to mobilize a respectable turnout on February 12. The day was marked
by church rallies, press conferences, and prayer vigils in nearly two
dozen cities. It was a modest beginning that could form the base for
future actions. Although King had hired Baker somewhat reluctantly, he
had to admit that she worked tirelessly and selflessly on the campaign.38
Since Ella Baker's style of political work placed more emphasis on
process than on singular, dramatic events, she understood that follow-up
activities would be even more important than the kick-off itself. After
returning to New York City to get her affairs in order, Baker returned to
Atlanta, agreeing to spend some additional time working to build on the
contacts she had made and the expectations that had arisen out of the
February 12 mobilization. Ever the field organizer, she was not satisfied
by her phone contacts with the various SCLC affiliates, so she packed her
bags and traveled around the region speaking at local meetings and
conferences and conducting workshops to promote and help initiate local
civil rights campaigns in the spring and early summer of 1958.39 The
strategy of SCLC was to encourage massive voter registration, working
through local affiliate organizations, and to document and report all
instances of harassment or interference with blacks attempting to
exercise the ballot. The campaign did make some inroads.
Historian Adam Fairclough presents the Crusade for Citizenship
campaign as a major shift in the organization's strategy: “No sooner had
SCLC formed than it switched its focus [from nonviolent direct action] to
voter registration” in an opportunistic response to the passage of the
1957 Civil Rights Act.40 Perhaps for some neophyte activists the shift
from nonviolent direct action for integration to political organizing for
voting rights was indeed a major one. For Baker, however, this strategic
move was more complex. Drawing on the lessons she had gleaned during
her NAACP days, she knew there had to be a catalyst for collective action.
The everyday routines of racism inspired spontaneous individual acts of
resistance, but these were usually limited responses. Sustained, concerted
action required a more proactive stance, grassroots organizing, and a
focus. For Baker, legislative victories were opportunities for organizing,
not ends unto themselves. She saw the Civil Rights Act of 1957,
although pathetically weak in its enforcement capacity, as providing an
opportunity to draw national attention to the shame of southern racism
and the undemocratic, racial exclusion that dominated the political
process. Equally important, the Civil Rights Act could become a focal
point for mobilizing local communities. Organizing people to testify at
hearings was a way to embolden local leaders and prospective activists;
it also served to challenge local elites in a public arena to defend
practices that had long been shielded by silence from outside scrutiny
and pressure. For Baker, mobilizing for voter registration campaigns,
documenting the establishment's corruption that undermined such
campaigns, and forcing the hand of the otherwise impotent Civil Rights
Commission would inevitably lead to direct action. Given the realities of
white vigilante violence in the South at the moment when Jim Crow was
facing a major challenge, Baker also recognized that direct action might
not always remain nonviolent.
GENDER INEQUITY WITHIN THE
MOVEMENT
Ella Baker launched SCLC's Crusade for Citizenship with a greater margin
of success than one might have expected given the time and resource
constraints, demonstrating that she had the skills and commitment the
nascent organization required. Yet Baker felt that she was never seriously
considered for the job of permanent executive director. At one meeting, a
minister from Nashville proposed that Baker be considered as a
candidate for the job, but his suggestion fell on deaf ears. “The
officialdom didn't take it seriously,” Baker recalled.41 The attitudes that
King and other ministerial leaders of the SCLC held toward Baker were
not unique to her situation; rather, they were a manifestation of the larger
problem of sexism within the church, the organization, and the culture.
By this time, Baker was well aware that the SCLC ministers were not
ready to welcome her into the organization on an equal footing. That
would be to go too far afield from the gender relations they were used to
in the church. Baker observed that “the role of women in the southern
church … was that of doing the things that the minister said he wanted to
have done. It was not one in which they were credited with having
creativity and initiative and capacity to carry out things.”42 While Baker
may have slightly overstated her case—women did have some power and
agency—the basic point still had a great deal of merit.
Clearly, women were instrumental forces in the church, but male
leaders seldom fully acknowledged women's power and often attempted
to limit the authority women exercised.43 Many of Baker's male
colleagues, like their counterparts in white society, viewed women as
subordinates and helpmates. Even though African American women
have historically worked both inside and outside the home and engaged
in public, political activity, the culture that prevailed in the 1950s,
especially among the black middle class, as among their white
counterparts, emphasized the primacy of women's domestic roles.44
According to Baker, the majority of the ministers in SCLC wanted to
relate to women in this very limited capacity. They were most
comfortable talking to women about “how well they cooked, and how
beautiful they looked,” she complained.45 Baker's deliberate avoidance
of conventional femininity made a number of her male clerical
colleagues rather uneasy. “I wasn't a fashion plate,” she remarked, “[and]
I made no bones about not being a fashion plate.”46 More importantly, “I
did not hesitate in voicing my opinion and … it was not a comforting
sort of presence that I presented.”47 The conditions under which she
worked, especially the sexist and often dismissive treatment she endured
from her male co-workers, annoyed and offended Baker. Some days she
could barely justify persevering in such an adverse situation.48 “I live to
serve” was the tongue-in-cheek way that Baker once described herself to
a cousin.49 This sarcastic statement had a sad ring of truth.
The work that Ella Baker and other women did for SCLC was
consistently undervalued. As the organization grew and additional
female staffers were hired, Baker protested that these women were taken
for granted and treated unfairly as well.50 A rhetoric of racial equality
marked the public pronouncements of SCLC leaders, while old hierarchies
based on gender inequities endured within their ranks. Baker refused to
accept the situation in silence. She criticized ministerial leaders who
came to meetings late and left early, disregarding the inconveniences
they caused for the female clerical staff. They expected the women
workers to cater to them, Baker complained.51 Although she never
publicly named names, Baker also alluded to unprincipled sexual
behavior on the part of some male ministers involved in the movement.
She confided to one researcher that certain SCLC ministers would come
into the office in the afternoon “after spending the morning at some
sister's house doing what they shouldn't have been doing … you see, I
know too many stories.”52 The ministers' arrogant assumption that they
stood above the moral rules they preached to others cost them Baker's
respect as ministers and as men.
Despite her frustrations and resentments, Ella Baker assisted SCLC
leaders in recruiting, screening, and selecting candidates for the
executive director post, which they had tacitly deemed her unqualified to
fill. She approached several prospective candidates with whom she had
worked in the past. John Tilley, who was hired as executive director, was
among them. Tilley was a Shaw alumnus and the pastor of a church in
Baltimore.53 Baker thought he was a good candidate because he “had a
clear voice and good thinking” and some political experience in
Baltimore.54 Baker and Stanley Levison met with Tilley at an ice cream
parlor in Harlem to discuss the organization and the job.55 When King
met Tilley, he was impressed and agreed to bring him on as the new
executive director in May 1958.
The first SCLC meeting after Tilley joined the staff took place in
Clarksdale, Mississippi, that same month. The gathering was well
attended by some 200 delegates, indicating that in many places the
organization's work was gaining support.56 Convening the group in
Mississippi was a bold gesture. Mississippi was so well known for
antiblack violence that for many southerners it served as a symbol of the
crudest and most brutal brand of white racism. Mississippi continued to
hold that distinction as the civil rights movement progressed. It was in
Mississippi that young Emmett Till had been murdered only three years
earlier. It was in Mississippi that three young civil rights workers—
Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney—would be
ambushed and murdered in 1964. And it was in Jackson, Mississippi,
that Medgar Evers, a state NAACP leader who participated in this SCLC
meeting, would be assassinated in his own driveway in 1963. But on the
weekend of May 29, 1958, the town of Clarksdale was the site of
something hopeful: serious discussions, debates, and strategy sessions
about the future direction of the Black Freedom Movement.
Baker went to Clarksdale a few days early to help set up for the
meeting.57 She was optimistic that things were finally coming together
for the new coalition. A permanent director was in place; local NAACP
leaders such as Evers had agreed to attend the meeting, despite tensions
between SCLC and the national NAACP office; and there were sparks of
activity in several cities.58 The participation of Evers and Aaron Henry, a
fellow NAACP activist, reflected the willingness of NAACP leaders at the
state and local level to work with whatever forces were in motion on the
ground, often in direct opposition to national directives.59 The men and
women under attack in the South did not always subscribe to the
grandiose objectives and long-term strategies of the national offices and
high-level leaders of the organizations with which they worked. Medgar
Evers and Aaron Henry never fully agreed with the decision by the
NAACP leaders in New York not to form alliances with other civil rights
groups, and both men worked closely with SCLC and other groups on
particular campaigns.60 Baker was pleased with the outcome of the 1958
Clarksdale meeting.61 She hoped Tilley would be a hands-on leader who
would expand the base of supporters beyond the church and embrace
some of the more militant community-based leaders, both secular and
church-related. Toward that end, she invited him to stay on in
Mississippi for a few days after the Clarksdale meeting and familiarize
himself with the work Amzie and Ruth Moore were doing in Cleveland,
Mississippi, which he did. But even putting Tilley in contact with some
of the most embattled freedom fighters in the South could not
reinvigorate the coalition.62
The internal problems of SCLC continued after the meeting in Clarksdale. Tilley did not prove to be the stabilizing force that Baker and King
had hoped for. Rev. Tilley continued to head his congregation in
Baltimore after assuming his new responsibilities in Atlanta, and he was
unable to combine or balance these two demanding positions. His
commuting back and forth took its toll on Tilley and on the SCLC's work.
In less than a year, King was forced to fire him. Again, by default, Baker
was asked to take over as acting or interim director; both titles were
used.
Internal problems were compounded by external crises. In September
1958, while Martin Luther King Jr. was on a speaking tour to promote
his new book, Stride toward Freedom, he was stabbed by a mentally ill
woman in Harlem, within walking distance of Baker's apartment on
135th Street. Ella was in town at the time, trying to recover from her own
health problems. Suffering from acute back pain, she was stretched out
on her living room floor when she heard the shocking news of King's
stabbing on the radio.63 Baker immediately rushed to the hospital to see
what she could do to help. King survived the attack, but his recuperation
took months. Once again, Baker had to pick up the slack. She filled in
for King as a speaker on several occasions, answered his
correspondence, explained his incapacitation, and served as publicist and
accountant for the sale of his book, a job she did not relish.
After a year of hard labor in the SCLC's trenches, Baker was
disappointed that so little had been achieved in terms of regionwide
coordinated work. She blamed the clerical leaders. They had not given
her the resources necessary to run an office or a campaign efficiently.
She had to beg for a working mimeograph machine, an air conditioner in
the summer, and secretarial help. She then had to deal with the added
frustration of King's veto power within the organization. Nothing could
be done, she complained, without his approval.64 And, to add insult to
injury, she was saddled with the responsibility of all promotions of and
sales for King's book. Still, Baker did not see too many other political
options for herself in 1958–59, especially if she wanted to be based in a
black southern community, which she did. So, she persevered.
Baker's 1958 report to the Administrative Committee of SCLC
reflected the goals that she would fight to implement throughout her
tenure. Baker urged her SCLC colleagues to develop programs for mass
action and to target women for activist campaigns. She specifically
called for the formation of youth and action teams to help ignite the
work. This report was her effort to rally the troops, but the results were
modest. Everyone nodded and continued on as they had before. Without
support from the principal decision makers in the organization, there was
little Baker could do.65
On some level, she and the ministers—at least the core of them—
were not too far apart in the kind of action they envisioned, but together
they could not seem to make it happen. Historian Glenn T. Eskew
suggests that Baker was at least in part to blame. He even sees the
growing “cult of personality” surrounding King as partly due to the
absence of a sustained mass-based campaign, a campaign Baker was
responsible for getting off the ground. For Baker, the inverse was true.
King's larger-than-life persona inhibited the emergence of local struggles
and local leaders.
In December 1958, at the third annual Montgomery Improvement
Association Institute on Nonviolence, the program theme was “A
Testimonial to Dr. King's Leadership.” Taylor Branch maintains that
“[t]o Ella Baker, frustrated by SCLC's bare solvency and its paralyzed
registration campaign, this sort of activity was not mere froth but a
harmful end in itself.” She asked King directly why he allowed such hero
worship, and he responded simply that it was what people wanted.66 This
answer did not satisfy Baker in the least.
Baker felt that SCLC's increasing reliance on King's celebrity and
charisma had all sorts of hidden dangers. Less polished leaders were
likely to receive less recognition and might become disaffected from the
struggle. For example, E. D. Nixon, the labor and civil rights activist
who played a pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott, resented the
way that an outsider eclipsed local leaders. In a 1958 letter to a friend,
Nixon complained bitterly about King's fame and his own diminished
stature in the movement. It is disheartening, he explained, “when people
give all recognition to one because of his academic training and forge[t]
other[s] who do not have that kind of training but are making a
worthwhile contribution.”67 Furthermore, no one person could possibly
meet the needs of a growing and increasingly complex movement. Even
leaders who were motivated by high ideals rather than personal ambition
and adopted a humble rather than top-down style had to make way for
many others to assume leadership roles. According to Baker,
organizations had to alter their very concept of leadership: “Instead of
the leader as a person who was supposed to be a magic man, you could
develop individuals who were bound together by a concept that benefited
the larger number of individuals and provided an opportunity for them to
grow into being responsible for carrying out a program.”68
Ella Baker believed that all their lives poor black people had been
spoonfed the notion that the key to their emancipation was something
external to themselves: ostensibly benevolent masters, enlightened
legislators, or skillful and highly educated lawyers. Such dependency
reinforced poor people's sense of helplessness, Baker felt. Her message
was quite the opposite. “Strong people don't need strong leaders,” she
argued.69 In Baker's view, oppressed people did not need a messiah to
deliver them from oppression; all they needed was themselves, one
another, and the will to persevere. The clerical leaders of SCLC, King
included, held a very different notion of leadership. As Baker put it, they
saw themselves as the new “saviors.”70 As early as 1947, she had
insisted that “the Negro must quit looking for a savior and work to save
himself.”71 She was even more convinced of this by 1958.
Crisis after crisis and sacrifice after sacrifice, Baker's dissatisfaction
with her circumstances grew. She became especially annoyed that many
SCLC ministers viewed her as a glorified secretary who was there to
simply “carry out King's orders.”72 Although the SCLC needed Baker's
skills, it was not willing to recognize or affirm her leadership. As Eugene
Walker put it in an interview with Baker, SCLC ministers seemed to
“respect your abilities on the one hand, and fear your independence on
the other.”73 To be fair, not all of the SCLC board members felt this way,
which in part was what kept Baker going. By 1959, she had built strong
ties with SCLC activists in Shreveport and Birmingham, and she had
alliances with NAACP people in Mississippi. Yet, despite her independent
base, Baker felt so suffocated by the magnitude of King's personality and
presence that she could not make herself comfortable within the
organization.
BAKER AND KING
The relationship between Ella Baker and Martin Luther King Jr. is
doubly significant. First, the incompatibility between the civil rights
movement's most charismatic national spokesperson and one of its most
effective grassroots organizers had significant consequences for the
development of the movement itself. Baker's decision to leave the SCLC
staff in 1960, her choice to support mass-based, grassroots organizations,
and her determination to defend the autonomous, democratic decisions
made by militant activists changed the course of the Black Freedom
Movement, not least by ensuring that the nascent Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee was not taken over by established civil rights
organizations, including SCLC and the NAACP. Second, the conflict
between these two civil rights leaders reveals more fundamental conflicts
within black politics and African American culture over the meanings of
American democracy and the pathways toward social change. If Baker's
criticisms of King were overly harsh and unforgiving, that may be
because they were intensified by her disappointed hopes in King himself
and by her accumulated outrage against the male leaders who had treated
her in demeaning ways over many decades.
In some of her harshest, perhaps even gratuitous, criticisms of King,
Baker described him as a pampered member of Atlanta's black elite who
had the mantle of leadership handed to him rather than having had to
earn it, a member of a coddled “silver spoon brigade.”74 He wore silk
suits and spoke with a silver tongue. His followers were in awe of him,
struggling in vain to imitate him or just seeking to be near him. Young
ministers would try to dress like him, even sound like him, Baker
observed, and their unsuccessful attempts only reinforced the perception
that he deserved the deference and adulation he received. King was, in
her words, “the man of the hour … [and others] got the reflective
glory.”75 In Baker's eyes, King did not identify closely enough with the
people he sought to lead. He did not situate himself among them but
remained above them. What Baker does not give King credit for is the
fact that while he may have allowed others to applaud his leadership
skills and oratory talents, he did not hesitate to take risks, putting himself
and his family in danger repeatedly for the sake of the cause. So, while
attention centered on him, so did the rage of those who, like his assassin,
blamed him for the movement's success.
Still, Baker felt the focus on King drained the masses of confidence in
themselves. People often marveled at the things King could do that they
could not; his eloquent speeches overwhelmed as well as inspired. This
disturbed Baker. While she appreciated King's many contributions to the
struggle and valued the considerable talents he brought to bear, she was
angered and frustrated by the hero worship that surrounded him. Baker
challenged King on this matter repeatedly, arguing that he tolerated, even
if he did not encourage, such adulation.76
In gauging the fairness of Ella Baker's criticisms of King, one should
keep in mind that she was known for her patience, tolerance, and
willingness to work with individuals of diverse ideologies. She had
collaborated with other men who were well known for their inflated
egos, from George Schuyler to Walter White. And, as King's biographers
have noted, he was in many ways quite humble, given the attention and
flattery he received from others. He lived modestly and was initially
quite ambivalent about all the attention and accolades that were directed
his way.
Why did King provoke Baker so much? Some of her friends and
colleagues have asserted that Baker's conflicts within SCLC resulted as
much from different personal styles as from political disagreements.
Septima Clark, who admired Baker greatly, felt that sometimes she
responded too angrily to insults and slights from the male clerics in SCLC,
when these situations could have been handled more effectively in a less
confrontational manner. There was undoubtedly a subjective component
to Baker's criticisms of King and the other SCLC ministers whom she felt
did not respect her as an equal. Anne Braden, who was much closer to
Baker than to King personally and politically, admitted that “Ella had a
blind spot when it came to King. It was just something about him. She
and I differed on this.”77
It would be misguided to view Baker's analysis of King's political
flaws too narrowly, however. She did not see King as unique; rather, she
saw what she defined as his weaknesses as reflective of prevalent
tendencies in American society. At the same time, she insisted that her
criticism never translated into personal animus, as some have alleged.
Baker remarked that “some of the King family have said that I hated
him, but I didn't.”78 King and Baker were bound together, from the very
inception of SCLC, by manifold political ties and real interdependence.
Their working relationship was close enough—even with King in
Montgomery most of the time and Baker in Atlanta—that their
fundamental differences became a recurring source of friction.
Still, King and Baker were more alike than Baker was ever prepared
to admit. Both were southerners by birth, and both had grown up in the
social and spiritual circles of the southern black Baptist church. Both
were college-educated intellectuals, articulate spokespersons for the
cause of black freedom and social justice, and eloquent public speakers.
And both came from class positions of relative advantage. But Baker and
King had made very divergent choices about how to utilize their skills
and privileges. They translated religious faith into their political
identities in profoundly different ways. Above all, they defined the
confluence of their roles as individuals and their roles as participants in a
mass movement for social change quite distinctly. Baker was a militant
egalitarian, and King was a sophisticated southern Baptist preacher.
In Baker's view, the celebrity status that the movement afforded King
was not an aberration but rather a product of a dominant culture that
promoted individualism and egocentrism. People “just have to have these
high-powered individuals to worship,” Baker pointed out.79 “It's the
culture we're in,” she insisted. “When the newspaper people come
around, what do they look for? They don't look for the solid
organizational drive … they look for a miracle performer.”80 Baker
believed that when ordinary people elevate their leaders above the
crowd, they devalue the power within themselves. Her message was that
we are all, as individuals, products of the larger society, even as some of
us struggle to change it. And all leaders, however well intentioned, are
susceptible to the corruption of personal ambition. According to Baker,
“We on the outside, we want to be important … so we ape the
insiders.”81 She argued that activists often unwittingly replicate the
values and attributes of those they oppose, which becomes a detriment to
the movement. While many black leaders criticized racial hierarchies in
the dominant society, they recreated hierarchies based on class, gender,
and personality within the movement itself. Baker insisted that leaders
live by the principles they espouse. In this sense, she argued, not only is
the personal political, but the political is inescapably personal.
Transformation has to occur at the societal and institutional level, but
also at the local and personal level.
Ironically, Ella Baker could not see in King what other colleagues and
his many biographers saw: a young man, talented, brilliant, eager to
serve a greater good but reticent about being lionized, and being pushed
and pulled in many directions all at once. In Baker's view, he was indeed
a talented young man who had been given a precious opportunity to help
organize large numbers of people into a fighting force for change, and
instead, she lamented, he settled for mesmerizing them.
MISSIONARIES AND MESSIAHS
King and Baker had been introduced to politics through the same
institution: the southern black Baptist church. Since slavery, the black
church had been an influential pillar in the African American community
and an important arena for black politics. The church provided blacks
with the technical skills to enter the political arena: literacy, fund-raising,
public speaking, management, and organization. In addition, the church
provided its members with a powerful moral language within which to
frame political issues, if they so chose. In a high school essay, Baker
wrote eloquently, and uncritically, about the important leadership role
played by the black church.82 Her ideas and analysis of the role of the
black church, and of the clergy in particular, had changed considerably
over the years, but her understanding of the centrality of the institution in
African American life and culture remained intact.
Baker's political awakening began within the black Baptist women's
missionary movement in the early 1900s. Her mother was a devoted
activist who dragged Ella and her two siblings to missionary meetings
throughout their home state of North Carolina. These churchwomen
celebrated strength, piety, and quiet, selfless service. Egos and individual
accomplishments were downplayed. Humility was a virtue. In contrast,
King was groomed from an early age to follow in his father's footsteps
into the ministry. Playing a visible leadership role in the church, and
thereby occupying a prominent place in the black community, was an
honorable career goal for a young man from such a deeply religious
family.
King's and Baker's respective orientations within the church could not
have been more different. Ministers were trained to be shepherds of their
flocks. The metaphor itself suggests the differences between the notions
of leadership that ministers practiced and those that missionary women
adhered to. Ministers directed their flocks; missionaries gathered people
together. In Baker's view, most ministers expected to say their piece and
have their congregations obediently carry out their decisions. Baker saw
no model for collective or democratic decision making within the
mainstream ministerial tradition. The preacher's presumed authority did
not trouble men like King, however. As he himself put it, “Leadership
never ascends from the pew to the pulpit, but … descends from the pulpit
to the pew.”83 But Baker saw this flow of authority as a weakness, not a
virtue. The socialization of women missionaries meant that they
practiced a more democratic and decentralized style of religious service
than male ministers did.
Another philosophical position that distinguished Baker from King
was the issue of nonviolence. Baker accepted nonviolence as a tactic, but
she never internalized the concept as a way of life or made it a defining
feature of her worldview. Contrasting herself to her friend Bayard
Rustin, Ella Baker remarked: “He had a history of dedication to the
concept of nonviolence. I have no such history; I have no such
commitment. Not historically or even now can I claim that because that's
not my way of functioning.”84 Rustin's pacifism was rooted in his
Quakerism, while Baker's Christian faith carried no imperative to turn
the other cheek or love your enemies. For her, nonviolence and selfdefense were tactical choices, not matters of principle. “Mine was not a
choice of non-violence per se,” Baker reiterated.85
Indeed, Baker questioned the capacity of nonviolence to serve as a
philosophical basis on which to build a movement, even while she was
working for the SCLC. She later questioned “how far non-violent mass
action can go” as a mobilization strategy.86 Her critique of the limitations
of nonviolence was informed by her connections with the militant
struggles of the 1930s and the self-defense ethos of those she worked
with in the 1940s, and it foreshadowed her support of revolutionary
militancy in the late 1960s. Baker consistently gave voice to a radical
vision for social transformation and encouraged others to join her in the
struggle necessary to realize that vision. The realist in her understood
that such a struggle might, at times, become heated and even physical.
Engaging in determined conflict entailed utilizing a variety of tactics.
Baker felt that oppressed people needed to tap whatever resources they
had at their disposal to forge a viable strategy for resistance, especially in
the dangerous and violent climate of the Jim Crow South. She was not
alone in this view. Some of SCLC's most notable grassroots leaders,
including C. O. Simpkins and Daisy Bates, admitted to having firearms
for self-defense purposes.87
Baker differed with King and other SCLC leaders on questions besides
nonviolence and the meaning of leadership in militant mass movements.
Bernice Johnson Reagon has suggested that Baker's worldview and
political practice can best be defined as a type of radical humanism.88 It
was radical, in that she advocated fundamental social transformation, and
it was humanistic, because she envisioned that transformation coming
about through a democratic, cooperative, and localized movement that
valued the participation of each of its individual members. Baker's
unfaltering confidence in the common people was the bedrock of her
political vision. It was with them that she felt the locus of power should
reside. This confidence was rooted in her understanding of the complex
dialectical relationship between deference and defiance in southern black
culture. Despite the facade of subservience and acquiescence to white
rule and Jim Crow indignities on the part of southern African Americans,
many black people embodied a fighting spirit that needed only a viable
outlet to demonstrate and to express itself in subtle ways every day. It
was important for political organizers to understand and decode the
culture of everyday life, and to tap the reservoir of resistance that resided
there, in order to pull people into collective action.89 In Baker's
assessment, assuming that people were quiescent was a misreading of
southern black culture.
In this respect, Baker's views parallel those of the anthropologist
James Scott, who writes eloquently about the “hidden transcript” of
opposition within oppressed populations and about the danger of not
reading that transcript carefully. Scott warns:
So long as we confine our conception of the political to activity
that is openly declared, we are driven to conclude that subordinate
groups essentially lack a political life or that what political life
they do have is restricted to those exceptional moments of popular
explosion. To do so is to miss the immense political terrain that
lies between quiescence and revolt and that, for better or worse, is
the political environment of subject classes. It is to focus on the
visible coastline of politics and miss the continent that lies
beyond.90
Scott's theoretical work on the nature of popular culture and resistance
resembles many aspects of the politics that Ella Baker lived but rarely
wrote about. From her point of view, it was a semi-spontaneous action
from below—Rosa Parks's reasoned decision to violate a segregation
ordinance—that had sparked the Montgomery boycott. It was another
semi-spontaneous action—a handful of college students sitting in at a
lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960—that would ignite
the next phase of movement activity. These actions were thought through
and conscious, but they were both examples of leadership coming from
below (the metaphorical pews) rather than from the political pulpits
above. These actions also tapped into a subterranean oppositional culture
and gave it a political outlet.
Baker's political views were profoundly shaped by her analysis of the
complex class dynamics within the black community. As she put it,
“There's always a problem in the minority group that's escalating up the
ladder in this culture … it's a problem of their not understanding the
possibility of being divorced from those who are not in their social
classification.”91 For this reason, she argued, “I believe firmly in the
right of the people who were under the heel to be the ones to decide what
action they were going to take to get [out] from under their
oppression.”92 She held fast to her conviction that the most oppressed
sectors of society had to be in the forefront of the struggle to change
society.
Ella Baker's job tenure with SCLC was more frustrating than fruitful.
She was unsettled the entire time, politically, physically, and, to a certain
extent, emotionally. She had no solid allies in the SCLC office that she
could rely on daily as she had done during her years with the NAACP. Her
close and increasingly critical view of King put some distance between
Baker and her old In Friendship allies, Levison and Rustin, who adored
King. Moreover, she had never really settled into her semifurnished
apartment in Atlanta and found herself on the road more than she was
there. Emotionally, there were some disconnects as well. Jackie was in
college. Baker's marriage had ended in divorce in the summer of 1958
while she was in Atlanta.93 And her health had begun to effect her work.
Her eyes were bothering her, as were her back and encroaching arthritis.
Still, there were pockets of activity among some SCLC affiliates that
persuaded Baker to stay with the organization a little bit longer.
Image Not Available
Ella Baker in 1932. (Thanks to The Crisis Publishing Co., Inc., publisher
of the magazine of the NAACP, for use of this work, first published in The
Crisis Magazine, January 1932)
Ella Baker in suit, ca. 1942. (Library of Congress)
Image Not Available
Ella Baker with NAACP colleagues, September 1945. (From the Gazette
and Daily; photograph Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
New York Public Library)
Image Not Available
Ella Baker with group of girls at NAACP fair, 1950s. (Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Austin Hansen
Collection; courtesy of Joyce Hansen)
Ella Baker with unidentified man in Shreveport, Louisiana, 1959.
(Courtesy of C. O. Simpkins)
Ella Baker and Myles Horton in lawn chairs at Highlander Folk School,
ca. 1960. (Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi-3236)
Ella Baker smiling, 1962. (© Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos)
Image Not Available
Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Stokely
Carmichael, and others at Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1964. (© 1978
George Ballis/Take Stock)
Image Not Available
Ella Baker delivering a speech in Atlantic City, 1964. (© 1978 George
Ballis/Take Stock)
Image Not Available
Ella Baker at podium, with Charles Evers seated behind her and Ivanhoe
Donaldson to her right, delivering a speech in Jackson, Mississippi,
1964. (© 1976 George Ballis/Take Stock)
Ella Baker singing at SCEF luncheon, 1970s. (© 2002 Charmian
Reading)
Ella Baker at Angela Davis rally, 1972. (Photograph by Charley Sands;
permission courtesy of the Daily Cavalier, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville)
Ella Baker with David Dellinger and Marilyn Clement at CCR dinner,
May 13, 1980. (© 2002 Charmian Reading)
Ella Baker with William Kunstler and Marilyn Clement in New York City,
1980. (© 2002 Charmian Reading)
Ella Baker in her bathrobe in her Harlem apartment, 1984. (Photograph
© Harvey Wang, from Harvey Wang's New York, 1990)
Ella Baker, Jackie Brockington, and Carolyn Brockington at City
College, 1985. (Courtesy of Jackie Brockington)
7 NEW BATTLEFIELDS AND NEW
ALLIES
SHREVEPORT, BIRMINGHAM, AND THE SOUTHERN
CONFERENCE EDUCATION FUND
I never worked for an organization but for a cause.
Ella Baker, 1968
In 1959, while continuing to work for the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, Ella Baker devoted her energies to the grassroots struggles
that were developing in cities, small towns, and rural counties scattered
across the South. Many local civil rights leaders were affiliated with
SCLC, but the organizations that conducted mass mobilizations were
locally controlled, and their political perspectives and strategies did not
always conform to the SCLC's philosophy. That was just fine with Ella
Baker. Her main contribution to the civil rights movement during her
years with SCLC was not the building of a solid regional coalition, which
was what King had hired her to do, but rather the strengthening of
several semi-independent local struggles, which were more connected to
one another and to itinerant organizers like Baker than they were to the
official SCLC leadership in Atlanta. Baker concentrated on those few local
SCLC affiliates that were making changes in their communities, not just
headlines in the national press.
Two such organizations dear to Baker's heart were the United
Christian Movement Inc. (UCMI) in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) in
Birmingham. Led by committed husband-and-wife teams, these groups
seemed to Baker excellent models for sustained, militant democratic
organizing. From the winter of 1958 through the summer of 1959, Baker
spent a great deal of time shuttling back and forth between Birmingham
and Shreveport, punctuated by regular trips to her home base in Harlem.
During this period, her sentiments toward SCLC were mixed, but her
loyalty to activists in places like Shreveport and Birmingham was
unwavering—and she would continue to work with them after she left
SCLC. Baker had acted the same way in the 1940s, when she resigned
from the national NAACP after serving as its independent-minded director
of branches. Baker's fundamental commitment was to grassroots
activism, mass mobilization, and democratic change, and wherever she
saw signs of movement in that direction she was eager to lend her
support, expertise, and passion.
The struggle over racial justice was heating up in 1959. In May, Baker
expressed her outrage at the rape of a young black woman in Florida by
four white men, adding that “Negroes all over the south would watch
developments closely” in the case.1 Another case, the more widely
publicized death of Mack Charles Parker at the hands of a Mississippi
lynch mob aroused enormous anger, and the fact that his killers, like so
many others before, went free compounded the outrage. The longstanding rule of “Judge Lynch” in the South seemed more than ever a
travesty of justice in the late 1950s, and increasing numbers of African
Americans refused to back down in the face of vigilante violence or
official repression. The militant defiance of Robert Williams, a black
activist in North Carolina, and, by the early 1960s, the growing
popularity of Malcolm X, the radical minister of the Nation of Islam,
signaled a changing mood across the country. Some historians have
suggested that established civil rights organizations were paralyzed or
weakened during the late 1950s by the conservative and conformist ethos
of the Cold War. After all, the Brown decision had been followed not by
rapid integration of public schools but by a concerted campaign of
“massive resistance” across the white South. This view, while not invalid
at the national level, is only partly correct; the situation on the ground in
some places was quite different. Despite the precarious state of national
and regional Black Freedom organizations, there were local pockets of
fierce antiracist resistance throughout the South during the late 1950s.
Baker's position with SCLC enabled her to jump right into the fray,
drawing up battle plans with local leaders and urging other communities
to follow their lead.
In 1959, as she traveled the region, Baker searched for political
communities where her day-to-day practice could more fully reflect her
philosophical principles and political convictions. She concentrated her
energies on local sites of struggle that could, she hoped, become
launching pads for militant, regionwide mass action and serve as models
of a democratic practice. Birmingham, Alabama, and Shreveport,
Louisiana, were two such places. Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth of
Birmingham and C. O. and Dorothy Simpkins of Shreveport were
effective organizers who shared Baker's commitment to mass
mobilization. Baker also began to work very closely with Anne and Carl
Braden, radical white activists in the Southern Conference Education
Fund (SCEF), an interracial desegregation and human rights group based
in the South. With comrades she trusted and close ties to freedom
struggles growing up at the grassroots, Ella Baker was slowly creating a
more comfortable political home for herself.
NOTHING TOO DEAR TO PAY FOR
FREEDOM
Baker gave voice to her radical ideas, even when they clashed with
SCLC's image and politics, in order to support and educate activists who
were organizing mass movements for civil rights in their own
communities. On June 5, 1959, in Birmingham, Alabama, she delivered
one of the most militant speeches of her political career. She had been
invited to deliver the keynote address at the third anniversary celebration
for ACMHR. The evening meeting was held at the New Pilgrim Baptist
Church, and her friend Ruby Shuttlesworth, a local activist, introduced
her. As Baker rose to the podium wearing one of her signature hats and a
crisp summer dress, complete with pocketbook and pumps, she must
have looked more like a Sunday school teacher or Missionary Society
member than the dangerous radical the FBI feared her to be.2 But when
Baker spoke, she expressed radical views that were based on her long
experience in organizing for social change and on local activists' long
experience of violent repression by the city's white racist officials.
Surrounded by a community of people she admired, who had continued
their struggle despite beatings, bombings, and economic reprisals, she
delivered a provocative address titled “Nothing Is Too Dear to Pay for
Freedom.”
Baker was unflinching in her indictment of racism and in her call for
an intensification of antiracist struggle. Only a few months after King's
return from a trip to India, where he reaffirmed his own unfaltering
commitment to Gandhian nonviolence, Baker publicly posed the loaded
rhetorical question, almost as a gauntlet thrown down for her listeners to
pick up: “What is the basic right of the individual to defend himself?”3
Ella Baker's speech in Birmingham in 1959, in both tone and
substance, exemplified the militancy that predated the 1960s and
stretched across regions and generations. Urban black youth in the late
1960s were not the first African Americans to maintain that defending
themselves from racist attacks was morally justifiable. Foreshadowing
Malcolm X's famous declaration, “by any means necessary,” Baker
exhorted her audience, “Guide-posts to first-class citizenship call for the
utilization of all resources at the group's command,” and told them that
even life itself was not too high a price to pay for freedom. After
condemning the “accommodating type Negro leader,” Baker questioned
the viability of nonviolence in the face of such extreme violence from
segregationists. The Birmingham World, the city's black paper, described
Baker as “calm, analytical, and eloquent” and summarized her remarks at
Pilgrim Church that summer evening as follows: “Calling for a reexamination of the doctrine of non-violence, Miss Baker questioned the
wisdom of allowing the more favored segment to take violent and
unlawful advantage without self-defense… . [S]he reminded her listeners
that the constitution gives to every citizen the right to defend himself.”4
With clear logic and a direct challenge to her listeners, Baker put her
own radical views on the table and took her stand with the emerging
militant wing of the civil rights movement.
Baker further reminded her audience that the stakes for freedom were
high and applauded militant leaders like Fred Shuttlesworth who were
“determined to secure the full loaf of freedom and not just the crumbs.”5
Baker was not calling for guerilla warfare or riots in the streets; she was
simply affirming a long-standing black tradition of self-defense against
mob violence, which whites had used to enforce the racial and economic
hierarchies of the Old South for generations. Undoubtedly fresh in
Baker's mind and the minds of her listeners was a vivid example of the
long history of vicious antiblack violence that occurred only two months
before: the brutal lynching of Mack Charles Parker, a black
Mississippian dragged from his jail cell and murdered by a mob, which
then threw his body into the Pearl River.6
Baker had traveled extensively through Ku Klux Klan territory during
the 1940s, and she spent time with people who lived under the constant
threat of vigilante violence. In contrast to the predominant, but
erroneous, image of southern blacks as passive, foot-shuffling folk who
acquiesced to white domination, the southern blacks whom Baker knew
and worked with owned guns and were not afraid to use them for
personal protection.7 These were honest, hard-working, God-fearing
people, but they were also fighters.
Robert F. Williams, a North Carolina activist to whom Baker alluded
in her Birmingham speech, identified with and embodied that tradition of
self-defense.8 As head of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the
NAACP, Williams became a symbol of southern black militancy and a
source of immense controversy within the resurgent Black Freedom
Movement. In May 1959, in response to the acquittal of a white man
who had assaulted a black woman, the outraged Williams declared that
the time had come to “meet violence with violence,” since racist courts
seemed to place little value on either black rights or black lives.9 Press
across the country picked up the story. The headline of the New York
Times proclaimed: “NAACP Leader Urges Violence.” Roy Wilkins, head
of the national association, was furious at Williams, publicly repudiated
him, and on May 5 suspended him from his post as president of the
Monroe branch. Williams, like Baker, had previously had numerous
clashes with the NAACP's national office, and he still claimed many allies
and admirers at the branch level. Many North Carolinians wrote to
Wilkins to protest Williams's suspension.10 The Williams controversy
was still raging when Baker arrived in Birmingham on June 5. Although
she shied away from explicitly endorsing Williams's actions or ideas in
her speech, she gave him a favorable nod.11 Emory O. Jackson, the
outspoken editor of the Birmingham World, who covered Baker's speech,
wrote that after “blistering the accommodating type Negro leader” Baker
went on by “citing three instances which reflect the shifting status.” One
of those examples was “the strike-back declaration of Robert Williams,
the unfrocked NAACP branch leader in North Carolina.”12 She then went
on to underscore the right to self-defense.
Six months earlier, Ella Baker's old friend Conrad Lynn, a black leftist
lawyer she had worked with during the 1930s, had asked her to join the
campaign that he and Williams were organizing to defend two black
boys, aged eight and ten, who were jailed for allegedly kissing a white
girl in Monroe, North Carolina. Although she expressed sympathy for
the defendants in the highly publicized “kissing case,” Baker declined to
become directly involved. Perhaps she anticipated the disapproval of her
SCLC colleagues and was playing it safe at that point. Both Williams and
Lynn were controversial figures, and the involvement of the Socialist
Workers Party in the case had already drawn allegations of communist
influence.13 Avoiding controversy was uncharacteristic for Baker, but
she sometimes tempered her inclination to do and say whatever she saw
fit with a practical recognition of the possible consequences. By June
1959, she was willing to do so less and less. In her eyes, the mass
militancy of the resurgent civil rights movement had the potential of
bursting the bounds that regional and national organizations were trying
to impose.
Although Baker and Williams never worked together formally in the
NAACP or on the “kissing case,” there were other political connections
between them. One of Baker's dearest friends, the feminist lawyer Pauli
Murray, represented Williams at his hearing before the NAACP's national
board on June 8, 1959, speaking eloquently, but unsuccessfully, in his
defense.14 Carl and Anne Braden of SCEF also sympathized with
Williams, even though they criticized many of his tactics.15 James
Forman, who later worked closely with Baker in the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was beaten and arrested in Monroe in
1961 because of his association with Williams and his supporters.
According to Tim Tyson, Williams's biographer, Baker encouraged
Forman and his co-worker Paul Brooks to visit Williams's hometown
that summer to investigate the situation there.16 They found the city in
flames. Fires of suspicious origins had been set the night before their
arrival, igniting accusations and counter-accusations on both sides.
Armed groups of white men roamed the streets, and Forman feared for
his life. In the heat of one of the nights of turmoil, Williams detained a
white couple who had entered a cordoned-off black neighborhood. He
claimed that he had kept them indoors to ensure their safety, but the local
authorities indicted him on a charge of kidnapping.17
In the summer of 1962, just before Williams's trial was scheduled to
begin, Baker visited Monroe to check out the situation for herself. The
opportunity had presented itself in the most unusual way. Dorothy
Dawson (Burlage), a young white civil rights worker originally from
Texas, had been sitting in Baker's Atlanta office when she received a
phone call telling her that a black teenage volunteer, Raymond Johnson,
had died in a suspicious drowning accident in Monroe. Dorothy had
befriended the boy's mother, Azalea Johnson, when the two were
assigned to room together at an SCLC citizenship school in Dorchester,
Georgia, some months earlier. Dorothy had been so impressed with Mrs.
Johnson that she drove to Monroe several times over the summer to visit
her and soak up some of her wisdom. When the news of Raymond's
death came, a distraught Dorothy decided to go to Monroe for the
funeral. She was surprised when Baker quickly volunteered to go along.
“Miss Baker did not even know Mrs. Johnson at the time; I think she just
wanted to comfort her and to be supportive of me. That's how she
was.”18 But there was more to it than that. Baker cryptically confided to
her friend Anne Braden that the “kidnapping trial was due to be held [in
Monroe] on Monday, but I understand it has now been postponed but
there are some other developments which bear looking into and this is
one of the reasons I am taking this short trip.”19 Yes, Baker was
genuinely concerned about Dorothy and the grieving mother, but she was
also constantly surveying the political landscape with her fine-tuned
political radar, trying to detect signs of activity and to assess their
importance. This was an occasion to get a close-up look at what had been
brewing, and boiling over, in Monroe. Dorothy and Ella did not arrive in
time for the funeral, but they stayed several days with Azalea Johnson,
eating, drinking, and talking politics.20
Azalea Johnson was not just an ordinary citizen of Monroe, either.
She had been the secretary at the Monroe NAACP branch when Williams
was expelled and remained in the inner circle of Robert and Mabel
Williams. The three of them had founded a newspaper, the Crusader, to
which Johnson had contributed a regular column. She had traveled to
New York with the couple and to Tennessee to the Highlander Folk
School with Mabel for a conference. Azalea Johnson was a homegrown
intellectual if there ever was one. Not only was she an able writer and
political analyst of local race issues, but she was an astute observer of
global politics as well. Dorothy was shocked when her plainspoken and
unassuming roommate at Dorchester pulled out a book by Mao Zedong
and asked if she had ever read it. Dorothy had not even heard of Mao at
the time. It was an education on many levels.
Ella and Dorothy got an earful about Williams and Monroe politics
during their stay at Johnson's home. The three women sat at Azalea
Johnson's kitchen table, Dorothy remembered, drinking Jim Beam
bourbon, discussing the political situation in the South and remembering
Raymond. Even more memorable than the conversation was the image of
black men sitting in the front room and on the front porch with loaded
pistols at their sides virtually the whole time they were there. The
situation in Monroe was just that volatile.21
Fearing a long jail term for what many felt were trumped-up
kidnapping charges, Robert Williams ultimately fled the country. He
ended up in exile in Cuba, by way of China, while the debate over selfdefense within the Black Freedom Movement continued long after his
departure.22 Throughout the Williams ordeal, Baker kept her finger on
the pulse of militant upsurges in Monroe and elsewhere.
At the time of her 1959 speech, Baker was not prepared to join forces
with Robert Williams and his militant allies. She did not call for the
formation of paramilitary groups or for a symbolic public show of armed
force; she called, quite simply, for self-defense. At that time, like many
black freedom fighters before her, she was unwilling to tolerate enemies
of the movement assaulting and murdering leaders with impunity. She
had seen too many friends and colleagues victimized by such violence.
Moreover, she understood that it was quite commonplace for southern
blacks to defend themselves when threatened or attacked, contrary to
many northern stereotypes and assumptions. Carrying guns was not a
matter of principle or political strategy for most black southerners; it was
a means of survival. Baker acknowledged that at times nonviolence was
a viable and effective tactic, but she never embraced it as a philosophy.
As Baker became more vocal about her radical views in 1959, the FBI
became more interested in her.23
None of the young militants who led the Black Freedom Movement
during the next decade were in the audience to hear Ella Baker's remarks
that night at Pilgrim Church in June 1959, but they might as well have
been. Her remarks were circulated in the press and echoed through the
coming years. Seven months later, young people acted on her call for
renewed militancy and direct action by launching the historic
desegregation sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. Seven years later, in
1966, others followed Robert Williams's lead by forming the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California. The young
activists of the 1960s did not invent either the radical antiracist ideas
they espoused or the confrontational tactics they embraced; rather, they
inherited and reconfigured them.
BIRMINGHAM
Baker's intimate involvement in the black freedom struggle in
Birmingham extended back to the 1940s. Her June 1959 speech on selfdefense grew out of the relationship she had developed with local
activists and the respect and admiration she had earned. Baker had
become comfortable in the “Magic City” during her visits there as a field
secretary for the NAACP, when she recruited new members in the city's
black barber shops and bars. Birmingham was familiar turf. When Baker
returned there during the late 1950s as a staff member of SCLC, she
reestablished contact with the old-timers and met younger activists in the
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). Baker
understood the situation that had shaped the struggles of the city's black
residents for more than a generation.
Birmingham was one of the most volatile and racially explosive cities
in the entire South, best known for its ruthless chief of police, Eugene
“Bull” Connor and his rigid enforcement of the racist hierarchy of the
South.24 For Baker, however, Birmingham's significance came from the
fact that it was home to tireless and courageous civil rights activists like
Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth. By the 1950s, the Shuttlesworths were
anchors of the local movement there. They had worked with the state
NAACP before it was banned and then had helped found the more activistoriented ACMHR. The Shuttlesworths were no-nonsense fighters who
were as bold and determined as they were savvy and pragmatic. Their
reputations as local militants were well earned.
Ella Baker's respect for the Birmingham activists was also inspired by
what she viewed as their grassroots approach to organizing.
Birmingham's leaders, Baker thought, were “much more mass-oriented”
in their political work than most organizers she had worked with.25
Baker felt that Fred Shuttlesworth tried to act in accordance with the
wishes of the “masses,” even if he did not always poll them to determine
what those wishes were. Notably, ACMHR held regular mass meetings to
which all were welcome and at which substantive political and strategic
discussions could take place.
Baker's assessment of Shuttlesworth's democratic tendencies contrasts
with that of some observers, even admiring ones, who described him as
more of an authoritarian preacher than an inclusive democrat.26 Fred
Shuttlesworth was indeed a complex character. He was self-confident
and aggressive, and he sometimes acted unilaterally. At the same time,
he reached out to a wider constituency than most of his peers, and within
the movement he fought so that the voices of the poor and the working
class, who were frequently marginalized, would be heard. A colorful and
charismatic personality, Shuttlesworth was an egalitarian in his
principles, if not always a conscientious democrat in his practice. Baker
seemed willing to tolerate whatever other shortcomings Fred may have
had, praising him as a person of “undaunted courage, even in the face of
violence,” and applauding his personal integrity and “unselfishness as a
leader.”27 She viewed his zeal and charisma as talents applied in the
service of the collective interests of the disenfranchised rather than as
self-aggrandizing gestures on the part of a single individual, a distinction
that, for her, was critical.
The backdrop to Baker's visit to Birmingham in June 1959 was a
raging controversy between Fred Shuttlesworth and local attorneys who
wanted to charge fees for their civil rights litigation. Shuttlesworth had
openly criticized the attorneys' stance as opportunistic and greed-driven,
and he characterized many of their middle-class supporters as selfish and
elitist.28Over the years, Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth had numerous runins and conflicts with the city's black leaders; many moderates saw them
as too brash and militant to be effective. However, under Fred's
leadership ACMHR was in closer touch with mass black sentiment in
Birmingham than any of its more moderate counterparts. Working-class
black youth were in an especially restive, even rebellious mood.29 By
engaging in and encouraging aggressive challenges to Birmingham's
white power structure, the ACMHR was responding to a popular mass
sentiment. As the historian Robin Kelley has put it, “The Alabama
Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), under the leadership of
the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, had the largest working poor
membership of any of the city's civil rights organizations.”30
In most southern towns with an active movement in the 1950s and
1960s, the black community had two distinct political factions. There
were the deal-makers, who bargained for incremental change, and then
there were troublemakers, who raised a ruckus. While the deal-makers
complained about the troublemakers' disruptive tactics, the two
tendencies were at times complementary; the troublemakers often
created the climate in which the deal-makers had greater leverage to
negotiate. The problem was that what moderates saw as a victory,
militants saw as a token concession. The Shuttlesworths and Ella Baker
found themselves more often in the second camp than the first, although
they crossed over to play the role of negotiator when the situation
required it. Fred Shuttlesworth was a member of the clergy, but he
represented a minority tradition of militant social activism within the
black church that Baker deeply respected. He embodied what Cornel
West refers to as a “combative spirituality,” a term that Andrew Manis,
Shuttlesworth's biographer, also uses to describe his subject.31
Shuttlesworth was as critical as Baker was of the self-promoting type of
ministers who preached passive compliance with injustice and
consolation in better times to come while pumping up their own egos and
lining their pockets.
Fred Shuttlesworth came from Oxmoor, Alabama, an impoverished
mining community just outside Birmingham.32 Baker had talked to him
about his background and had inquired about, in her typical fashion, who
his people were. Unlike Dr. King, Shuttlesworth was not a product of the
southern black aristocracy. His parents were never married; he suffered
from an abusive stepfather through most of his childhood; and at the age
of eighteen he was convicted of illegally distilling whiskey and
sentenced to two years probation.33 Despite this gritty past, or perhaps
because of it, Baker concluded with admiration that Fred Shuttlesworth
“came out of the masses, … [and] he was a part of the masses.”34
Shuttlesworth had broken ranks with the majority of Birmingham's more
prominent black clergy over politics and protocol. He was blunt and
confrontational, while others were more reticent and cautious. Some
viewed him as a hothead and an attention-seeker, but Ella Baker saw
something else in him and his wife. Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth not
only engaged in dramatic acts of bravery but worked very hard to build
an inclusive, grassroots movement in Birmingham that bridged deepseated class divisions.
The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights consciously
defied the social and economic barriers that divided black Birmingham,
reaching out to all sectors of the community without privileging local
elites with college degrees and social standing.35 In her travels, Baker
found that “in many southern cities, at that stage especially, there were
very sharp class lines in terms of what you had and how much education
you had.”36 She admired those who rejected this type of class
stratification. After Fred Shuttlesworth had obtained an education and
attained quasi-middle-class status, he made it his business to reach back
across that class divide as a matter of principle. In 1950, before his move
to Birmingham, he accepted a job as pastor of the prestigious First
Baptist Church of Selma, Alabama. His identification with poor and
working-class black folk was a constant source of tension and
controversy with the largely middle-class congregation. One of the
church elders advised Fred bluntly, “You are pastor of First Baptist now,
you don't need to fool around with those little niggers.” Fred replied
indignantly, “God must have loved those little niggers since he made so
many of them.”37 Fred Shuttlesworth's class sensibilities were still firmly
in place when he and his family moved to Birmingham some years later.
Ruby L. Keeler Shuttlesworth was as much Fred's colleague and
comrade as she was his wife. Her role in the Birmingham movement is
often overlooked or underrated. Ruby's adoptive father was a railroad
clerk, union official, and part-time undertaker who scraped together
enough money so that Ruby could study nursing at Tuskegee Institute in
the late 1930s. Not much is known about her mother, who was a
homemaker. Ruby left school in 1941 to marry Fred, who was working
as a handyman in a local doctor's office where she was employed parttime.38 Like most men of his generation, and despite his egalitarian
tendencies in community organizing, Fred Shuttlesworth held many
sexist views about women and marriage. He once commented, only halfjokingly, that no one had the right to tell his wife what to do except him.
And while he viewed himself as a political renegade who often
disregarded what others thought of him, he pressured Ruby to conform to
the expectations of his parishioners—singing in the choir and keeping a
spotless home—which is what was expected of a minister's wife. The
strong-willed Ruby refused to submit to his wishes on this and many
other matters. She had always admired Fred's principled defiance in the
face of racism, but when that same bull-headed manner carried over to
their domestic life, she resented and resisted it. She was also annoyed by
the fact that he was sometimes reckless and irresponsible when it came
to family finances. In 1959, she decided to return to school, over Fred's
objections, in order to improve her own earnings. Fred's continuing
conflicts with Ruby once erupted into a shoving match, and eventually,
in 1970, the couple divorced. Years after Ruby's death, Fred admitted
remorsefully that he had been too domineering and chauvinistic in his
marriage. Personal conflicts and struggles over gender issues were as
much a part of the Shuttlesworths' thirty-year relationship as their shared
commitment to social justice.39
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, even when they could not reach
consensus in their personal lives, Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth made
decisions together to take certain risks for the sake of the civil rights
movement. As a result, the entire family was targeted for reprisals, and,
as was typical throughout the South, Ruby was not spared because she
was a woman and supposedly less threatening. The enemies of the
movement knew better than to underestimate her. On Christmas Eve
1956, the Shuttlesworths' home was bombed and two of their children
were injured after they announced that ACMHR would launch a
desegregation campaign against the city busses, which had become the
site of intense confrontations. Two African American men had been shot
on the busses not long before.40 The bombing shook the Shuttlesworths,
but they remained undeterred.
The following year, in the spring of 1957, Ruby and Fred together
faced down a jeering mob to desegregate the local Greyhound bus
station. They sat in the whites-only section and traveled from
Birmingham to Atlanta in defiance of public protests by the Ku Klux
Klan. Ruby could have stayed at home with the children and allowed
Fred to go with one of his male allies, but they chose to take a political
stand together.41 On September 9, 1957, as the school desegregation
battle in Little Rock, Arkansas, dominated the headlines, the
Shuttlesworths decided to test the Brown decision in Birmingham by
attempting to enroll their daughters, Ruby Fredericka and Patricia Ann,
in one of the city's premier white schools. In correspondence with school
officials throughout the month of August, the Shuttlesworths were
warned in subtle and not-so-subtle terms that there would likely be
retribution if they proceeded with their plans. When Ruby, Fred, and
their two daughters, along with two other black students, approached the
school on the designated day they were once again confronted by a white
mob. Both sides refused to back down. Fred was beaten nearly
unconscious with brass knuckles and bicycle chains, and Ruby was
stabbed in the hip. One of their daughters was slightly injured as well.42
That night, ACMHR stationed armed guards outside its meeting, not an
uncommon practice in those days.43
The Shuttlesworths' home was repeatedly targeted for attack. Despite
the danger, Baker maintained a close association with the family, placing
her own safety in jeopardy. She visited Birmingham often in the 1950s
and early 1960s and always stayed with Ruby and Fred. During one such
trip in 1958, Baker's niece, Jackie, happened to be visiting Atlanta from
New York and joined Ella for a short trip to Birmingham. This was both
a social and political excursion. Jackie slept in the bedroom that had
been firebombed not long before. With that knowledge in mind, she slept
uneasily. Ella had deliberately kept Jackie safely out of harm's way even
as she herself took risks and traveled into volatile situations. That night
Jackie fully appreciated just how dangerous her Aunt Ella's work really
was. Jackie had known this abstractly before, but as she lay there, feeling
her own fear, the magnitude of Ella Baker's courage became apparent to
her.44
In 1958 and 1959, ACMHR was leading an intense struggle in
Birmingham. Fred Shuttlesworth's church was firebombed for a second
time in June 1958, and there were cross burnings and firebombings
throughout the summer. In October, fourteen people were arrested and
held without bail for protesting the revised segregation policy on the city
busses. Baker remained in constant contact with the Shuttlesworths
throughout this period, as did Anne Braden. Ruby and Fred
Shuttlesworth, like Ella Baker, were drawn to the Bradens. They struck
up a friendship and began to explore ways that the Southern Conference
Education Fund (SCEF) and ACMHR could collaborate. Ignoring redbaiting and the warnings of his ministerial associates, Fred went on a
series of highly publicized speaking tours that were jointly sponsored by
SCEF and ACMHR. Between 1958 and 1963, Fred Shuttlesworth became
more intimately linked to the Bradens and their network of southern
white radicals. Many SCLC supporters were dismayed by his open ties
with left-wing antiracists.45 For example, Alice Spearman, a liberal SCLC
supporter, confided to Baker that she was concerned about the influence
that “radicals” like Shuttlesworth were having on Dr. King. Ironically,
the naive Spearman seemed unaware of the fact that Baker shared
Shuttlesworth's radical ideas.46
SHREVEPORT
In 1959, Ella Baker also devoted a considerable amount of her time to
aiding the local struggle in Shreveport, Louisiana. The principal
organizers in Shreveport, Dorothy Simpkins and C. O. Simpkins, were
both militants and democrats, in line with Baker's own politics. She first
met C. O. Simpkins at an SCLC meeting in Atlanta in 1956. Simpkins had
heard Dr. King speak in Chicago earlier that year, and after the talk he
told him what was going on in Louisiana. King invited the young dentist
to visit Atlanta and join forces with SCLC. At his first SCLC board
meeting, Simpkins was extremely impressed with Baker. She did not talk
much, he recalled; but when she did, she was articulate, direct, and
insightful. She advocated aggressive actions and placed great emphasis
on indigenous leadership. Simpkins liked what he heard.47 From then on,
Baker and Simpkins had regular telephone conversations concerning not
only SCLC but also the larger issues related to the movement. In the
winter of 1958, when the Shreveport activists were about to launch a
major voter registration campaign in preparation for the July hearings of
the Commission on Civil Rights, Simpkins appealed to Baker to spend
an extended period of time there to oversee the work. At that point, she
was eager to get out of Atlanta and away from her ministerial colleagues,
so she agreed without hesitation.
Ella Baker had conferred with the activists in both Shreveport and
Birmingham about how to take maximum advantage of the Commission
on Civil Rights's scheduled hearings on voting discrimination.48 She saw
the hearings as an opportunity to mobilize around citizenship rights and
invigorate ongoing local struggles. Baker was well aware of the
commission's shortcomings, and she viewed its hearings as a catalyst for
organizing local people. As activists put the South's racist and
undemocratic electoral practices on trial, they urged disfranchised black
citizens to come forward and testify.49
The Civil Rights Commission originally scheduled hearings in
Shreveport for July 1959, and the Simpkinses' United Christian
Movement Inc. (UCMI) was prepared to take full advantage of the
opportunity. However, lawsuits by white officials challenging the
constitutionality of the commission eventually forced the hearings to be
postponed until September 1960. Baker was well aware of the type of
organizing necessary to put teeth into legislative victories. For her, the
passage of a law was the beginning rather than the end point of a
struggle. Challenging an interviewer in 1968 who invited her to assess
the value of such victories, she responded: “As you well know, we had
some very fine laws passed prior to the birth of either of us … [but] they
died as a result of the lack of implementation. Even the recent laws that
have been passed are only as valuable as the people you have alerted and
[who are] capable of using their combined power to see that they are
implemented.”50 Courageous and persistent leaders on the grassroots
level were key to creating change: their agitation drew attention to the
larger issues at stake and generated the climate for the implementation of
old laws and the passage of new ones.
When Baker went to Shreveport for a two-month stay, she was
looking forward to the battle that lay ahead. She knew she would be
fighting alongside some tough people with whom she had a strong
affinity. Like Baker, the Simpkinses—though educated and from middleclass backgrounds— had, as a matter of principle, little use for what
historians have termed the “politics of respectability,” a strategy of
conforming to dominant standards of respectable behavior and
appearance in order to prove that oppressed people were worthy of
citizenship and economic opportunities. Like his father, C. O. was a
dentist, and he had served in the military in Korea. Dorothy had been a
teacher in civil rights workshops. Yet the movement they led was
inclusive and democratic. The Simpkinses worked closely with poor and
working-class people in the Shreveport struggle, making every attempt to
blur and downplay the class differences between them. Most importantly,
they were rough-and-tumble fighters and had battle scars to prove it.
Dorothy Simpkins had repeatedly challenged segregation ordinances
on local trolleys and busses and in the local school system. Early in
1957, she and three others were plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the
Shreveport Trade School's policy of excluding black students. In
December 1957, she was part of another group that filed suit against the
city's policy of segregation on public trolleys and busses. Federal
authorities forced the state legislature to repeal the transportation
segregation statute in 1958.51 State lawmakers then passed a series of socalled safety ordinances that allowed drivers full discretion in making
seat “assignments” to passengers, supposedly in the interest of safety but
in practice enforcing racial segregation. The intrepid Dorothy Simpkins
was one of the first to test the new policy. In 1959, when confronted with
a trolley driver attempting to enforce the ordinance, Dorothy recognized
a prime opportunity to teach the thirty-two young Boy Scouts and Cub
Scouts whom she was escorting on a field trip, a lesson in political
resistance and personal integrity. When Simpkins was told to move to a
segregated section of the trolley, she steadfastly refused. The driver
summoned the police, who grabbed her by the arm and arrested her on
the spot. Some of the boys were visibly shaken by the incident, but
others beamed with pride that Mrs. Simpkins had stood up to the white
authorities.52
C. O. shared Dorothy's courageous convictions. They were a team,
personally and politically, for nearly thirty years. In 1957, after state
officials temporarily outlawed the NAACP in Louisiana (as had also
occurred in Alabama), C. O. was the only nonminister among the
founders of the United Christian Movement Inc. The Simpkinses both
suffered extensive harassment, intimidation, and violent attacks for their
activism. C. O. Simpkins “was arrested often, and crosses were burned
on his lawn; his newly built house was bombed.”53 In the most gruesome
harassment of all, dead animals with bullets through their heads were left
at the family's front door as a warning of what might happen if they
continued their agitation. The couple was forced to leave Shreveport in
the early 1960s. Later, they separated and amicably divorced. C. O.
Simpkins did not return to Louisiana on a permanent basis until 1987.54
For nearly a decade, the Simpkinses spearheaded the civil rights
movement in Shreveport. In Baker's view, Shreveport, like Birmingham,
served as a model of how a local community could organize itself
effectively. C. O. Simpkins, like Fred Shuttlesworth, shared Baker's view
of nonviolence as more a limited tactic than a way of life. When white
vigilantes shot at Simpkins, he shot back. For example, in 1958, when he
was returning from a meeting late one night, racist hoodlums tried to
intimidate him by shooting at his car, breaking the passenger window. He
had a German Luger pistol in his glove compartment; so, he hit the
brakes, reached for his gun, and returned fire. His attackers sped off.55
The community elder and local griot known as Papa Tight was
another respected figure in the civil rights movement in Shreveport. Papa
Tight was a fixture at the town's only barbecue joint, where he held court
most afternoons, chatting about politics, people, and current events. Even
someone like C. O. Simpkins knew very little about Papa Tight,
including his real name, which suggests he was not treated or viewed as
a social equal in all respects; but neither was he looked down on. He was
recognized as a movement adviser and supporter. Neither educated nor
from the middle class, Papa Tight surely gained his nickname from being
the quintessential town drunk. He never went to church; he drank too
much and too often; and he had frequent run-ins with the law, most of
which had nothing to do with politics.56 Papa Tight was not given to
eloquent oratory. He spoke in the plain dialect of the mass of ordinary
black southerners who had little formal schooling. In other words, Papa
Tight was the antithesis of the model Negro citizen that the national civil
rights movement leadership was trying to project to the national media.
But he was sympathetic to the movement, and he was well connected
among the city's down-and-outers. While established race leaders might
have seen Papa Tight as a source of embarrassment, UCMI leaders
welcomed him into the movement. “We were not going to close the door
on him if he wanted to help,” C. O. Simpkins explained. “We needed him
and he did good work putting the word out to support the movement.”57
Papa Tight not only served the movement as a recruiter, but he was also
sought out for the insight and advice he had to offer.
Ella Baker took a special liking to Papa Tight and enjoyed many long
conversations with him during her stay in Shreveport. She was interested
in what problems he thought Shreveport blacks were facing and what
would motivate ordinary folk to get involved in making a change.
Indeed, it would have been out of character for Baker to have shunned
Papa Tight in any way.58 She often railed against the social snobbery and
political shortsightedness that led some black leaders not to take
seriously the grievances or political insights of those at the bottom of the
social and economic ladder and of those who, like Papa Tight, did not
conform to bourgeois standards of respectable behavior.59
Baker repeatedly recounted the example of how some middle-class
Negro leaders distanced themselves from the so-called town drunk to the
point of being unwilling to defend him if he were attacked by local
racists or beaten by the police. In her experience, “There were those
people who, if John Jones was a drinker and not a church goer, they
might have had grave doubts about the virtue of going down and …
getting him out of jail,” even if he had been a victim of police brutality.60
The sinful, hard-drinking, tough-talking fellow with little social standing
among the finer families in town was viewed as an embarrassment to the
race whose “uncouth” behavior undermined group progress. In the words
of Roy Wilkins, Baker's former colleague at the NAACP, “We must clean
up and educate and organize our own people, not because they must be
perfect in order to be accorded their rights, but they cannot be first-class
citizens in truth until they appreciate the responsibilities of that
station.”61 Baker's view was quite different. Poor people should not have
to be made deserving of their citizenship or their economic claims; such
rights were fundamental.
Much of the social and political interaction Baker had witnessed
between elite and nonelite black people occurred within the confines of
what historians have termed “uplift ideology.” These were relationships
of un-equals, the groomed and educated tutoring and guiding their social
subordinates.62 The obsession with respectability, in Baker's opinion,
was a political trap that undermined critical thinking and lessened the
ability of activists to be truly radical in their ideas, actions, and alliances.
This class-biased ideology also cast middle- and upper-class blacks as
the natural leaders and spokespersons for the race, to the exclusion of
others.63 Baker's ideas represented a sharp break with this dominant
bourgeois ideology and the political strategies that it spawned, and those
ideas opened up the possibility for working-class and poor people to take
hold of the mantle of leadership.64
In addition to crossing some of the many class barriers that existed
within the black community, the leaders of the Shreveport movement
made more tepid gestures toward challenging conventional gender roles.
The movement boasted a very active core group of women leaders.
Many of these women were self-employed, often as beauticians, and thus
were less vulnerable to direct economic pressures than domestic workers
were. Mamie Love Wallace, Bernice Smith, and Ann Brewster were
among the best known.65 “We had a lot of strong women involved,” C.
O. Simpkins recalled; “Ella and Dorothy weren't the only ones.”66
When Baker arrived at the airport in Shreveport in February 1959
with her beat-up suitcase in one hand, her pocketbook in the other, and
one of her signature hats perched on her head, she did not look much like
the polished political organizer that she was. Her arrival probably went
unnoticed by local police officials, but she soon made her presence
known. The Simpkinses had arranged for Baker to stay with their
neighbor, Willa Bell Clark, a single woman with an extra room.
Although Clark was not directly involved in the civil rights struggle, she
was one of its many silent supporters. She worked for a wealthy white
family in town and was fearful that a more open association with UCMI
would jeopardize her job. Letting Baker stay with her was her small,
secret way of contributing to the movement. Clark exemplifies the
popular support that the Simpkinses had helped to mobilize in
Shreveport. Baker appreciated Clark's hospitality and made sure to write
her a detailed thank-you note upon her departure, reaffirming that her
contribution to the struggle was appreciated.67
Baker's routine in Shreveport was to rise early and head over to the
UCMI office, situated in a corner of C. O. Simpkins's dental office, to
begin a long day of typing, phone calls, visits, and meetings. She often
remained there until late into the evening and then joined the Simpkinses
for dinner and conversation. Ella had great affection for Dorothy and C.
O., and the sentiments were mutual.68 The three friends sat up late many
nights talking about personal and political matters. As close as she felt to
her Shreveport friends, Baker kept her secrets. She told them all about
Jackie, her pride and joy, but never mentioned that she had been married
and was only recently divorced. She was always very private about what
she termed her “domestic relationship,”69 and by 1959 there wasn't much
of a relationship left to conceal. She and Roberts had been separated for
some time, and her move to Atlanta had put even more distance between
them. Their divorce became final in the summer of 1958.
The friendship Baker shared with the Simpkinses helped sustain her
throughout the Shreveport campaign. She knew when she went to Caddo
Parish that she was entering a volatile and dangerous situation.
Shreveport segregationists had made heinous threats and carried out
many of them. Churches and homes had been bombed. Activists had
been beaten in the street, some of them in broad daylight. Local
segregationists were not at all fond of interfering outsiders. In a
newspaper report during the voter registration protests, the registrar
singled Baker out for particular contempt. “She is not even a
Louisianan,” he grumbled, indignantly describing her as “that Baker
woman from Atlanta.” Like many white segregationists who blamed
“outside agitators” for stirring up trouble in communities they sought to
control, he attributed much of the local unrest to her organizing efforts.70
Although Baker reported back to the SCLC office periodically, she
functioned in Shreveport as a freelance organizer and political consultant
while on SCLC's payroll. Despite some media attention and the
Simpkinses' references to her as the coordinator of the Shreveport
campaign, she consciously downplayed her role and resisted becoming
the primary spokesperson for the group. She directed the day-to-day,
behind-the-scenes work related to the campaign, and she served as UCMI's
principal strategist, tactician, and staffperson during her seven-week stay.
It was the opportunity to dig in and work shoulder-to-shoulder with local
activists that most appealed to Baker. She respected the autonomy of the
local leadership and resisted any attempts to promote herself as “the”
leader or outside expert. Local people would be there long after she had
gone. In the final analysis, the major political decisions had to be theirs.
She intended to leave behind a more skilled, confident, and emboldened
local leadership rather than a singular victory.
Baker worked in Shreveport off and on from early February until late
March 1959. She met with local groups and leaders on a weekly basis,
worked on the UCMI newsletter, and helped launch and sustain a UCMI
youth group.71 A typical week's schedule for Baker was packed. On
February 22, she spoke at the 11:00 A.M. service at Evergreen Baptist
Church. The next day she spoke to the Stoner Hill Civic Group in the
morning, and at 8:00 P.M. she was standing in the pulpit at Hopewell
Baptist Church preaching the virtues of electoral participation. On
February 24, she addressed the Shreveport Parent Teacher Association
council at the Lakeside Branch Library at 5:30 P.M. and met with the
Federated Club Women Presidents group at 8:30 P.M. At 7:30 P.M. the
next evening, she gave a talk at Shady Grove Baptist Church. Her
schedule often began at 8:00 A.M. and ended well after midnight with a
summary report or an informal evaluation meeting reviewing the day's
events with Dorothy and C. O.72
The citywide voter registration campaign in Shreveport culminated on
March 19, which local activists had designated “R-day,” or registration
day. Activists led a mass attempt to register. They hoped this campaign
would either add to the city's black electorate or offer evidence of the
obstructionist practices of local officials, which could then be presented
to the Commission on Civil Rights. Black Shreveporters who were
already registered were asked to gather at 9:30 A.M. on the third floor of
the Caddo Parish Courthouse in downtown Shreveport and to bring along
at least one friend or family member who was not yet registered.73
On R-day, C. O. Simpkins canceled all his dental appointments,
closed his office, and encouraged his patients to attend the protest
instead. At the crack of dawn, Dorothy and Ella sat sipping coffee at the
Simpkinses' kitchen table and going over lists of tasks for the day,
including reminder calls that had to be made and people to be picked up.
Over 200 people participated in R-day. The organizers had hoped for a
bigger crowd, but they were pleased that those who did turn out were
steadfast and undaunted by the pouring rain and by the intimidation
tactics of the local segregationists.
One of the routine tactics of the registrar of voters was to stall the
registration process with unwarranted delays. The protest on March 19
became a “stand-in,” as dozens of prospective voters stood for hours in
long lines, only to be turned away on an array of technicalities. Some
were told they had given the wrong birth date if the date they gave
differed by even a day from that recorded by the county. Others were
told that the identification they presented was insufficient proof that they
resided in the state.74 Many prospective voters never made it inside the
office. At the end of the day, only forty-five of those who stood in line
were actually allowed inside, and only a handful of those were actually
allowed to register.75
Baker had no intention of accepting such treatment silently. When by
midday the registration process was creeping along at a snail's pace, she
went back to C. O. Simpkins's office and angrily telephoned the Caddo
Parish registrar, U. Charles Mitchell, to complain, insisting on more
timely and efficient processing of applicants. Mitchell was outraged by
her gall and hung up on her.76 Baker also assiduously detailed every
obstructionist tactic in preparation for what she hoped would be public
hearings that would put local white political leaders and officials on trial.
The voter registration campaign was countered by intensified
opposition from white segregationists. While civil rights activists
campaigned to increase black voter registration and to document
electoral fraud for the benefit of the Civil Rights Commission, Louisiana
segregationists were redoubling their efforts to maintain white control by
decertifying black voters who were already registered. State Senator W.
M. Rainach, a rabid racist who chaired the joint legislative committee on
segregation and was considering a run for governor, was a high-profile
spokesman for white supremacy in Louisiana. Milking antiblack fears
and hostilities among the white electorate, Rainach toured the state in
1959 “lecturing voter registrars on strict enforcement of voter
qualification laws,” admitting that, while some of those excluded would
be whites, most would be blacks.77 Rainach worked in open collusion
with the Louisiana White Citizens' Councils to purge black voters
systematically from the voting rolls. The council members routinely
showed up at registrars' offices around the state and insisted on seeing
the list of eligible voters. They combed through the list, highlighted
black registrants' names with the letter “C” for “colored,” and petitioned
the registrar to review these voters' eligibility on a variety of flimsy
grounds. In the southeastern dairy town of Franklinton, in Washington
Parish, the local registrar of voters actually appealed to the courts to
impose an injunction blocking the council's campaign because it was
interfering with the daily functions of his office. The court refused.
On Friday, March 21, two days after the protest at the Caddo Parish
Courthouse, Judge C. A. Barnett threw out the request for an injunction,
applauded the segregationists' actions, and called on other white citizens
of the state to “stand up and be counted” by joining the crusade to ensure
that “unqualified” persons did not exercise the vote. This response
reflects the extent of antiblack sentiment and the depth of the
commitment to black disfranchisement that permeated all levels of
government in the state, as was true across the South during this
period.78
Ella Baker understood that the struggles in Louisiana and Alabama
represented only the tip of the iceberg of southern racism and injustice
and gave only a hint of black people's willingness to resist oppression.
She was committed to the struggle for the long haul, having devoted
thirty years to progressive causes. In 1959, she had not yet found the
right political organization to serve as her base of operations, but she was
finding like-minded allies in the mass movements that were emerging in
the South.
One way that she sustained herself physically during times of intense
struggle, and psychologically and emotionally during lulls, was by
reconnecting with old friends and comrades. They took care of her and
provided her with refueling stations and respite from battle as she
continued her itinerant insurgency across the South. One such person
was Odette Harper Hines, a woman who had overlapped with Baker in
Harlem in the 1930s and worked alongside her during her NAACP days in
the 1940s. By 1959, Hines had relocated to Alexandria, Louisiana, not
far from Shreveport; after several weeks of tireless work in Shreveport,
Baker took time out to visit Hines for a few days to relax and regenerate
herself. Hines was a true fan of Baker's, describing her as “a person with
great integrity … very human and warm,” with a sharp “clarity of
analysis” about political matters—overall, “an extraordinary woman.”79
The two middle-aged activists “talked politics a little,” but the purpose of
the trip was really to give Ella a break. Hines recalled that when her old
friend arrived, “her tongue was hanging out. She was exhausted.”80 So
Hines was content to pamper her a bit, make her her favorite shrimp
salad, and provide her with some rare moments of solitude and calm.
After her stay in Alexandria, Ella Baker went back to the battlefield in
Shreveport for a few weeks more and then on to Birmingham, Atlanta,
and New York for meetings and mobilizations.
CARL AND ANNE BRADEN AND THE
SOUTHERN CONFERENCE EDUCATION
FUND
In the late 1950s, Ella Baker began a relationship with Carl and Anne
Braden, two southern white radicals who would over time become two of
her closest friends and most trusted allies. Looking back in 1999 at the
couple's political contributions, Julian Bond referred to them as “modern
abolitionists.”81 In 1957, the Bradens joined the staff of the Southern
Conference Education Fund (SCEF), which had grown out of the Southern
Conference on Human Welfare (SCHW), a New Deal organization formed
in 1938, “based on a vision of a new democratic south that would be
built jointly by black and white people.”82 Among SCHW's supporters
were Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McCleod Bethune, and Charlotte
Hawkins Brown.83 In 1946, SCEF was formed as the tax-exempt
educational arm of SCHW; and when SCHW folded in 1948, SCEF carried on
the work of grassroots organizing. The organization raised funds for
embattled black activists, lobbied for implementation of Truman's civil
rights proposals, and tried to educate southern whites about the evils of
racism. In the 1950s, the members of SCEF lent support to SCLC's efforts
as much as it would allow, and in the 1960s they became stalwart
supporters of the renewed black protest movement. Fred Shuttlesworth
joined SCEF's board in 1958, and Baker accepted a full-time job with the
organization in 1962, after serving as a consultant, paid and unpaid, for
several years.84
The Bradens were part of a small network of progressive white
southerners who shared their antiracist views and activist orientation. In
their politics, however, they were decidedly to the left of most of their
colleagues, both white and black, and the notoriety the Bradens had
earned during and after the McCarthy era meant that many civil rights
activists were reluctant to work with them.85 In the context of the Cold
War South, where antiracism and communism were virtually
synonymous in the segregationist imagination, people committed to
equal justice were lumped together regardless of their actual political
affiliations; the whole lot of them were labeled subversives and made the
targets of reproach, harassment, and reprisals. The Bradens' outspoken
advocacy of social justice and racial equality had cost them dearly,
although, like Ella Baker, they focused on the struggle rather than the
sacrifices it entailed. The couple endured loss of work, death threats, and
years of government surveillance and persecution. Carl twice served time
in prison for his political work, and Anne was jailed repeatedly for short
stints. Throughout these tumultuous years, Anne raised their three
children and held the family together.86 The Bradens' stubborn
perseverance endeared them to Baker. Their unflagging allegiance to the
cause of racial justice was all the more impressive in comparison to the
“ambivalence” expressed and the “moderation” advocated by most white
liberals and some leftists during the 1950s.87
Anne Gamrell McCarty and Carl Braden, both natives of Louisville,
Kentucky, met in 1947 while working as reporters for the Louisville
Times and married in 1948. From then on, they fought side by side as
radicals and social reformers, gaining regional and then national
reputations. They were quite a pair. Thin, wiry, and intense, Anne was a
keen strategist with an intuitive ability to size people up right away. Carl,
a stout, blustery, and sometimes brash working-class union organizer,
made up for his lack of finesse with an unconditional commitment to
social justice that earned him friends and foes alike. Carl's political
passion had won Anne's attention and ultimately her heart. Anne and
Carl complemented one another personally and politically, and their
mutually supportive relationship sustained their activism over many
years.88
The Bradens challenged racial injustice in all of its forms, from
lynching and segregation to the denial of voting rights. In 1951, Anne
went to jail briefly for protesting the unfair prosecution of a black
Mississippi man, Willie McGhee, for the alleged rape of a white woman,
which evidence suggested he did not commit.89 In early 1954, the
Bradens surreptitiously bought a house in a white section of Louisville
on behalf of a black couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, deliberately
violating the city's segregation laws and triggering a storm of violent
protest among whites. Not only were they maligned and hounded for
their actions, but Carl Braden was convicted under a World War I-era
sedition law and sentenced to eight months in prison.90 The prosecution
argued that the Bradens engaged in a conspiracy to foment chaos by
purchasing the house for a black family. In 1958, Carl was targeted
again, this time by the Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S.
House of Representatives (HUAC). He refused to cooperate with the
committee, and in 1961 he spent ten months in prison for contempt of
Congress.91 While the Bradens were not open members of the
Communist Party (CP), they believed that socialism represented a more
humane way of organizing society than capitalism—a view that Baker
had long held—and they refused to countenance the denial of civil
liberties to radicals.92
Baker was heartened by the moral stamina the Bradens had
demonstrated, and she was eager not only to support them but also to
find a way to work with them more closely and more consistently. She
felt they shared more of her political values than the majority of her SCLC
colleagues. In addition to their committed left-wing and antiracist views,
the Bradens shared Baker's confidence in the political capacity of
ordinary people to change their own lives. According to Anne Braden,
one of the most important lessons that she learned during her early
political involvement was that poor black people were their own best
advocates; while they needed allies and resources, they did not need
middle-class whites (or blacks, for that matter) telling them what to do.93
This is a concept that southern segregationists and the FBI found difficult
to grasp. They persisted in the erroneous assumption that southern blacks
would simply not stand up for themselves and demand fair treatment
unless someone “smarter”—white or northern—put them up to it. Baker
and the Bradens vehemently rejected such racist and elitist assumptions.
On the surface, Ella Baker and Anne Braden were very different
women. One black, the other white, they were nearly a generation apart.
Anne did her political work in tandem with her husband, who was her
closest political comrade until his death in 1975. Ella Baker was fiercely
independent all of her adult life and consciously disassociated her
marriage and family life from the political circles in which she traveled.
But in other, more fundamental ways, they were very much alike. Both
were women of great principle and integrity. Anne and Ella
demonstrated a deep determination to fight injustice that was tempered
by patience and generosity toward those alongside whom they fought.
Neither was fully recognized or financially recompensed for her
achievements and service. Yet each had a major influence on an entire
generation of younger activists. Ella Baker and Anne Braden had crafted
for themselves identities and work that defied assumptions about what
women from middle-class families, black or white, should be and do.
Both served as powerful alternative role models for young women who
came of age politically during the early 1960s. Bold, confident, and
intellectually sophisticated, they were tireless organizers and generous
mentors.94
Ella Baker met Anne Braden in the winter of 1956, during the
campaign to win Carl's release from prison the first time. Anne was
traveling around the country desperately trying to drum up support for
her husband's case, and in New York a mutual friend who worked with
the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee put her in touch with Baker.
They got together at a tiny neighborhood restaurant in Harlem. Anne
remembered that Ella's immediate response to her request for help was to
take out a pen and paper and begin to list the names of other people she
could contact in New York. Baker thought it was outrageous that the
Bradens would be abandoned by former friends because of their alleged
communist affiliation. In February 1956, Baker helped organize a
support rally for Carl Braden at the Community Church in Manhattan.95
At the time, Baker was immersed in the New York City school struggle,
but she made the time for a stranger in need. Her unqualified support
made a lasting impression on Anne Braden, beginning a close and
enduring friendship.
Ella Baker and Anne Braden became reacquainted in the midst of the
civil rights campaign in Birmingham in 1958. One chilly fall evening in
Ruby and Fred Shuttlesworths' home, Anne recalled, Ella was sitting at a
table, “wearing a black pillbox hat pushed to the back of her head,”
making yet another list—this time a list of what had to be done the next
day for the desegregation and voter registration campaign. Anne had
driven from Louisville to lend her support. She and Ella chatted,
compared observations about civil rights activities in Birmingham and
elsewhere throughout the South, and found a bit of humor to share as
well.96 They swapped stories, laughed, and bonded. There was
something visceral in the connection.
Anne and Carl Braden became familiar faces to civil rights activists
during this period. Like Baker, they gravitated to wherever struggles
were taking place. The Bradens crossed paths with Baker and the
Shuttlesworths routinely at meetings, late-night strategy sessions,
workshops, picket lines, and the homes of mutual friends. Their personal
and political bonds deepened as a result. Anne Braden later described
Ella Baker as one of her “strong and brave allies” who “never feared
association with us and always provided support.”97
Although Anne Braden appreciated Ella Baker's principled stance in
her defense and recognized Baker as one of the most effective opponents
of red-baiting within the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s, she
also acknowledged that Baker's position had evolved slowly over time.
Like all historical actors, Baker was inescapably influenced by the
society and history that she fought so hard to change. During the late
1950s and early 1960s, when American political culture was defined by
the ideology and rhetoric of the Cold War, anticommunism was prevalent
in the Black Freedom Movement as well. Baker's position on
communism and anticommunism was ambivalent at best. She was
resolute on most issues, but on this one she vacillated. She worked with
Stanley Levison against the anticommunist McCarran Act, then served
on the “watchdog” committee to keep communists out of the NAACP, then
befriended the Bradens as they were being hounded by HUAC, and then
participated in a 1957 mobilization that openly prohibited communist
participation.98
We can infer a few things from Baker's awkward navigation of this
issue. One, she could have been considered a part of what Herbert Hill
has described as the anticommunist left of the 1930s, although she would
be more aptly characterized as a noncommunist than an anticommunist.
She never attacked her communist friends, but she worked with and was
surrounded by people who did: A. Philip Randolph, Lester Granger,
Pauli Murray, and others. The disagreements were real, but the different
sectors of the left—socialists, communists, and other factions—worked
together off and on during the 1930s. For some in Baker's circle, they
acted principally on their convictions, disagreeing without denouncing
their opponents. Others saw Bolshevism and later Stalinism as so
detrimental to social progress that they sought to undermine communists
at any cost.
When the Cold War and McCarthyism set in, the stakes changed, and
old adversaries of the CP had some hard choices to make. Would they
join the government crusade against the “reds” or take a stand in defense
of the larger principle of civil liberties? Some tried to navigate a position
somewhere in between: challenging McCarthyism as the persecution of
innocents while implying that the persecution of real communists was
justified. Baker seems to have straddled the fence on the question at least
for a while, leaning on the pragmatic side of condemning red-baiting
without defending the rights of communists. Baker's relationship with
the Bradens may have been the critical variable that moved her to a more
well defined position. They were closely associated with the left and
made no apologies for it, but Baker sided with them anyway, eventually
coming to the conclusion that the corrosive effect of anticommunism had
to be fought aggressively if any broad-based progressive movement was
going to survive. Interestingly, even though Baker sat on a committee
that expelled communists from the NAACP's New York branch in the
1950s, she would join the Angela Davis defense committee to win the
release of the jailed communist leader in the 1970s. Like Martin Luther
King Jr., Malcolm X, and Du Bois, Baker did not hold to static political
positions. Her views evolved over the course of her long political career
as a result of her engagement with and reassessment of the world and the
forces around her. The influence of those she met and respected also had
an effect.
Baker worked directly with the Bradens for the first time in a sustained
way when she and Carl joined forces to organize a set of mock civil
rights hearings called “The Voteless Speak,” which were held in
Washington, D.C., in January 1960. Both SCEF and SCLC hoped that the
hearings would reactivate the stalled U.S. Civil Rights Commission,
which had become dormant soon after its creation under the 1957 Civil
Rights Act. In response to the moratorium on official government
hearings on civil rights violations, SCEF decided to establish a volunteer
commission that would hold its own unofficial hearings on electoral
abuses, collect data on voting fraud and discrimination, and use that
information to try to resuscitate the official commission.
In order to broaden participation and gain publicity, SCEF invited other
groups to cosponsor the hearings. Reactions were mixed. Some of the
more mainstream civil rights groups viewed SCEF with suspicion,
primarily because of Carl Braden's imprisonment for contempt of HUAC
and the couple's openly radical views. There was a debate inside SCLC
about whether to even cosponsor the hearings. Baker was a strong
proponent of the hearings, and SCLC finally agreed to sign on.
On January 21, 1960, Ella Baker arrived in Washington to join Carl
Braden as a co-coordinator of the project.99 Ella and Carl became close
friends during those intense weeks of organizing. While spending long
hours arranging conference logistics, they talked about everything from
world politics to family life.100 Few of her close political associates even
knew about her private life, but Carl and Anne knew more than most.
Although there is no evidence that Baker shared her innermost feelings
with Carl or revealed the more personal details of her private life, they
talked about what politics, struggle, and sacrifice meant to each of them.
Their friendship deepened as a result. Baker commented soon after that
“if Carl was a communist, we need more of them.”101 She never asked
either Carl or Anne whether they were, in fact, members of the cp. As
time went on, it simply did not matter to Baker.
Aaron Henry, a militant Mississippi NAACP leader, came to
Washington, D.C., for the hearings, and Braden recruited John McFerren,
a representative of the black sharecroppers' struggle in Tennessee, to
testify about his experiences. They were also able to involve the veteran
activist and educator Nannie Helen Burroughs.102 Baker held the
legendary antiracist and women's rights crusader in high esteem. In their
1959 correspondence, Baker expressed her eagerness to feast on
Burroughs's “wit and wisdom” and applauded her “organizational drive
and accomplishments.”103 Although Baker could be enormously
charming when she chose to be, she never doled out flattery insincerely.
When she began doing outreach to D.C.-area civil rights activists to
mobilize local support for the mock hearings, the elderly Burroughs
responded enthusiastically, helping Baker and Braden to secure a site for
the hearings when the church they had booked canceled at the last
minute.104 This campaign was one of Burroughs's last; she died in 1961.
Ella Baker and Carl Braden were optimistic that the voting rights
hearings cosponsored by SCLC and SCEF in Washington, D.C., set to begin
on January 31, 1960, had the potential to make a significant impact on
national politics and reignite the stalled civil rights movement—or at
least light a few sparks. Much to their surprise and delight, the black
student sit-in movement began the very next day, entirely independently
of their efforts, and immediately overshadowed the hearings.
THE ADVENT OF THE SIT-IN MOVEMENT
On February 1, 1960, four black college students sat down at the “whites
only” lunch counter at the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina,
and refused to move. After several successive days of sit-ins, the store
gave in and served the young black patrons without serious incident. The
students' actions ignited a blaze of sit-in demonstrations that spread
quickly across the South. By the spring, over 100 cities had been
affected, several thousand youthful protesters had been arrested, and
violent counter-demonstrations had made headlines across the country.
What began as a single protest action had rapidly generated the sparks of
a movement, freeing the pent-up political ambitions of students, in
particular black students, all over the country.105
When the sit-ins erupted seemingly spontaneously, involving clusters
of young people throughout the South, they energized and piqued the
interest of civil rights activists everywhere, black and white, young and
old. The sit-in was a more dramatic and confrontational tactic than the
bus boycott of five years before. By doing something, instead of
withholding participation, young people put their bodies on the line in
order to challenge segregation and second-class citizenship. They
steadfastly endured hostility and violence. Lit cigarettes were gouged
into some protestors' backs, and food was dumped in their laps.
Solidarity demonstrations and picket lines sprang up in cities throughout
the North.
When Baker heard about the sit-ins, the protests were still local and
small in scale; they had not yet made national headlines. Recognizing the
demonstrations' potential to catalyze a mass movement, Baker called her
contacts in other cities to find out what was going on. When she returned
from Washington to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta, Fred Shuttlesworth
called with the news that the sit-ins had just spread to High Point, North
Carolina, where he had been visiting. Fred was already excitedly urging
students in Birmingham to conduct their own demonstrations. The sit-ins
had become contagious. Baker, Shuttlesworth, and the Bradens were all
ecstatic.
Baker later recalled that she was not surprised that the initial sit-ins
had occurred, since in her view oppressed people had always fought back
in one way or another. What did surprise her was how rapidly the
protests had caught on in city after city.106 Baker attributed this chain of
events, in part, to social and family networks among southern blacks.
When sit-ins occurred at one school, students would call relatives and
friends in nearby towns and spread the word in advance of media
coverage. Baker knew that organizers had to appreciate and tap into
these social and familial networks in order to mobilize southern black
communities. During the next few years, with Baker's encouragement,
this is precisely what young organizers did under the banner of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and their half-dozen or so local
organizational affiliates. The sit-in demonstrations and the militant new
leadership that emerged from them were the answer to Ella Baker's
political prayers.
By the end of 1959, Baker was already preparing to leave SCLC. King
invited her to stay on in a diminished capacity once the new director,
Wyatt T. Walker, was hired. But there was more promising political work
on the horizon, and Baker was ready to go. In 1960, young activists took
up the challenge she had laid out in her speech in Birmingham in June
1959. Once again, Baker was invigorated and hopeful about the political
possibilities for the South and the nation. “This may only be a dream of
mine,” she confided to Anne Braden, “but I think it can be made real.”107
8 MENTORING A NEW
GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS
THE BIRTH OF THE STUDENT NONVIOLENT
COORDINATING COMMITTEE, 1960–1961
Throughout the decade of the sixties, many people helped to ignite or
were touched by the creative fire of SNCC without appreciating the
generating force of Ella Jo Baker.
James Forman, 1972
In the young and determined faces of the sit-in leaders, Ella Baker saw
the potential for a new type of leadership that could revitalize the Black
Freedom Movement and take it in a radically new direction. Baker
wanted to bring the sit-in participants together in a way that would
sustain the momentum of their actions, provide them with much needed
skills and resources, and create space for them to coalesce into a new,
more militant, yet democratic political force. Maintaining the neophyte
activists' autonomy from established civil rights organizations was one of
her key objectives. But she also hoped they would develop their own
vision and strategy based on the transformative experience of
confronting injustice personally and collectively. The students' direct
assaults on Jim Crow had done more to demolish the most ubiquitous
and offensive everyday forms of segregation than years of carefully
orchestrated national campaigns. While exemplary local movements
such as the Montgomery bus boycott seemed difficult to replicate in
other locations, the sit-in tactic had spread with startling rapidity. Above
all, the young activists themselves seemed transfigured by their success,
and their challenge to segregation was reshaping national politics.
After the success at Greensboro and the wave of sit-ins that rippled
across the South, Baker took immediate steps to help the students
consolidate their initial victories and make linkages with one another,
and she set the stage to move them in what she hoped would be a
leftward direction. Under the auspices of SCLC, Baker called for a
gathering of sit-in leaders to meet one another, assess their respective
struggles, and explore the possibilities for future actions. The Southwide
Student Leadership Conference on Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation
was held on April 16-18 (Easter weekend), 1960, and attracted some 200
participants, more than double the number Baker had anticipated. Many
of the young people came out of sheer curiosity, eager to protect their
local autonomy but interested to hear what others were doing. The
gathering took place at Baker's alma mater, Shaw University, in Raleigh,
North Carolina, where she herself had begun her activist career more
than forty years earlier. Around the country, a number of similar
meetings were convened by various organizations to support the
southern students, analyze the significance of their actions, and capitalize
on the momentum they had generated. The gathering that Baker
convened in Raleigh had the most profound and lasting results.
A month before the Shaw meeting, Baker conducted her own political
reconnaissance, contacting friends around the country to collect
information on the political mood of the students and others' responses to
their actions. She wanted to put her finger on the political pulse and
assess the protests' potential before deciding what role she would play at
the conference. During the week of March 7-12, Ella Baker met and
talked with literally hundreds of students and community leaders about
the impact of the sit-ins and potential for future actions. She then wrote
up a ten-page report for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) that reflected her findings.1 Baker also talked the issue over with
Doug Moore, a young minister from Durham, who had convened a
smaller meeting of sit-in demonstrators in North Carolina in February,
and Rev. Glen Smiley, a white official with the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, and persuaded them that the students would be better off
as a new and independent group.2 When the Shaw meeting got under
way, Baker had already decided to support what she determined was the
sit-in leaders' desire for autonomy. Her “basic hope from the beginning
was that it would be an independent organization of young people.”3
A politically shrewd and purposeful organizer, Baker clearly had her
own political goals going into the Raleigh meeting, but—ever the
democrat—she was careful not to be too presumptuous about what the
students themselves did or did not want. She had to strike a balance
between putting forward her own very strongly held views and values
and being careful not to intimidate, overwhelm, or alienate her
prospective allies. After all, in the spring of 1960 there was no basis for
them to “embrace me with open arms,” as she put it.4 She had yet to earn
their trust. Baker appreciated and encouraged their desire to arrive at
their own consensus and even make their own mistakes. She was also a
stickler for process. She did not want to rush things; she knew that
forming an organization, like building a movement, took time and
patience.
Even if Baker had been so inclined, she could not simply have
dictated what direction the student movement was going to take. The
young activists were inexperienced, but they were not blank slates on
which Baker or Martin Luther King Jr. could write a political script.
They each brought something with them: ambitions, passions, ideas, and
ways of doing things. In the case of the Nashville students, they had
already embraced the philosophy of nonviolence as articulated by their
mentor, a Vanderbilt seminarian named James Lawson, who was an
admirer of Gandhi and a resolute devotee of nonviolence as a philosophy
and way of life. The Atlanta students, led by Julian Bond and Lonnie
King, had their own ideas as well. They had participated in sit-ins, but
they had also drafted a document, the Atlanta Appeal for Human Rights,
which had been published in a local paper and which embodied their
concept of how the struggle should be framed. So the students had ideas
of their own, and no one understood or appreciated this more than Ella
Baker.
SETTING THE STAGE AND PLANTING THE
SEEDS
The atmosphere on Shaw's campus that weekend was electric. The
discussions were lively, and the mood was optimistic. For many of the
students, it was not until the gathering in Raleigh that they fully
appreciated the national significance of their local activities. They felt
honored by the presence of Dr. King, whom they had watched on
television or read about in the black and mainstream press. He was a
hero for most black people in 1960, and his presence gave the neophyte
activists a clear sense of their own contribution to the growing civil
rights movement. Baker was content to use King's celebrity to attract
young people to the meeting, but she was determined that they take away
something more substantial. Most of the student activists had never
heard of Ella Baker before they arrived. Yet she, more than King,
became the decisive force in their collective political future. It was
Baker, not King, who nurtured the student movement and helped to
launch a new organization. It was Baker, not King, who offered the sit-in
leaders a model of organizing and an approach to politics that they found
consistent with their own experience and would find invaluable in the
months and years to come.
Baker's imprint was all over the Raleigh meeting. She did not make
any unilateral decisions, but she handled virtually all of the logistical
details.5 She understood how important details were in shaping the
character of an event like this, and she gave every task her utmost
attention. She collected news clippings about sit-in protests in various
cities and made profiles of the organizations and individuals involved for
her own knowledge and for publicity purposes. The group that gathered
at Shaw was an amorphous body that, at the outset, had the potential to
take any number of political paths. Baker structured the meeting so that
those who were politically engaged rather than those who claimed the
label of “expert” would be at the center of the deliberations.
The first goal was to provide those who had been directly involved in
the protests the opportunity to confer, compare notes, and brainstorm
about future possibilities in private. Baker urged those in attendance to
give southern students, who were disproportionately black and less
politically experienced, the time and space to meet separately, setting the
stage for them to be the principal framers of whatever organization might
emerge. “The leadership for the South had to be a southern leadership,”
Baker insisted. In her view, the sit-in leaders were on the front lines.
They had taken the initiative and endured the violence. Therefore, they
should retain the prerogative to structure and direct whatever
organization emerged from the conference. It was a matter of selfdetermination, defined broadly. Ella Baker was wary of experienced
leaders' tendency to move in and take control of locally initiated
struggles because they saw themselves as more capable than the local
folk. She had seen such dynamics again and again within the NAACP and
SCLC. Baker was determined not to let this happen to the nascent sit-in
movement.
On the second day of the Raleigh conference, Baker was invited—or,
as she described it, she invited herself—to a private meeting at the home
of the president of Shaw University, William Russell Strassner. The
incoming executive director of SCLC, Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, was there,
along with Ralph Abernathy and Dr. King. According to Baker, an effort
was made to “capture” the youth movement, an effort to which she
refused to be a party.6 There are different versions of the meeting, and
certainly differing views about whether SCLC intended to “capture” and
subordinate the emergent student movement. In Baker's account of what
occurred, she reprimanded the presumptuous ministers for their
territorial ambitions and walked out of the meeting.7
Although Baker was generally a sharp judge of character, her
suspicions of King's motives may not have been fully warranted in this
instance. King's speech to the Raleigh delegates praised the students for
having taken initiative and leadership. Yet Baker remained skeptical. Her
distrust of SCLC leaders had deepened over the course of her three-year
tenure with the organization. In her view, the SCLC ministers had badly
mismanaged their own organization, and she wanted to minimize their
control over this new crop of activists. She feared their efforts to annex
the new group would stifle and suppress the militancy and creativity that
the students had displayed. She also understood that since her own
troubled relationship with SCLC was about to come to an end, if the
students opted to become a part of King's organization, her role would be
sorely limited.
While Baker wanted to protect the students' autonomy, she was not
the hands-off facilitator that some have made her out to be. She
understood that the students needed guidance, direction, and resources
from veterans like herself who shared their general political orientation.
As she put it at the time, “However hopeful might be the signs in the
direction of group-centeredness, the fact that many schools and
communities, especially in the South, have not provided adequate
experience for young Negroes to assume initiative and think and act
independently has accentuated the need for guarding the student
movement” against those who might steer them in an undemocratic
direction.8 Simply stated, Baker saw some forms of intervention and
influence as empowering and supportive of the students, and others as
meddling and self-serving. This may seem like a double standard, but it
was a position that grew out of Baker's honest assessment of the political
forces at play at the time. She feared that the heavy-handed ministers
would usurp the mantle of leadership and the media spotlight. Her own
intention was to provide a gentle mentorship that would enable the sit-in
movement to develop in a direction that she could influence but would
not determine.
Baker's push for the students to remain unaffiliated did not stem
primarily from the fact that they were young and the more moderate
forces were older, although this was part of the rhetoric that she and
others used to make a case for their autonomy. She saw the emergent
movement not as a youth-only movement, but as “an opportunity for
adults and youth to work together to provide genuine leadership.”9 The
fundamental divide was not generational. After all, King, who was only
thirty-one years old in 1960, was closer in age to the students than Baker
was. The hypothetical case could have been made that SCLC's ministerial
leaders, most of whom were some twenty years younger than Baker,
were also youthful activists who deserved protection and insulation from
the critical interference of old-timers. This was not at all Baker's
position. In fact, she argued just as passionately for the autonomy of
middle-aged sharecroppers and community activists when student
organizers began lending support to their struggles beginning in 1961. In
Baker's view, the students who convened at Raleigh needed to be
encouraged to take the lead because they were at the forefront of the
struggle and represented the greatest hope for a renewed militant,
democratic mass movement, not simply because they were young.
For Baker, radical youth did have a unique, although not isolated, role
to play in the movement for social change. The energy and passion they
brought to bear was a vital resource. Students were less inhibited than
adults by concerns about jobs, children, and reputations. Still, Baker was
living proof that one did not have to be young to be radical. Her friend
Howard Zinn was another example: a white antiracist professor at
Spelman College, he became one of the early adult advisers of SNCC.
Septima Clark, the civil rights activist who organized Citizenship
Schools, first on the Sea Islands, then for SCLC in Georgia, was another
middle-aged radical. So were Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth of
Birmingham, Dorothy and C. O. Simpkins of Shreveport, and, of course,
Anne and Carl Braden of SCEF. Since young people were less socialized
and less indoctrinated with prevailing ideas than their elders, they were
generally more rebellious and more open to new ways of thinking. But
certainly youth was no guarantee of political radicalism, and age did not
always mean moderation.
It was radical youth Baker was concerned with. She wanted to
preserve the brazen fighting spirit the students had exhibited in their sitin protests. She did not want them to be shackled by the bureaucracy of
existing organizations. At this early stage, the nascent political ideas of
the students were not much more radical than those of SCLC's leadership.
However, Baker saw enormous promise in their courageous actions, their
creativity, and their openness to new forms of struggle, and she wanted
to give them the space and freedom for that potential to develop.
Another move Baker made that influenced the climate of the Raleigh
meeting was to limit media access to the proceedings. In closed-door
strategy sessions, the young people were able to express their views and
expectations candidly, without the intrusive presence of reporters. Some
of the students had already been captivated by the publicity their actions
had garnered, and Baker did not want to encourage any grandstanding or
speech making. As she put it, “the step that I took as far as the
conference was concerned, was to prevent the press from attending the
sessions at which kids were trying to hammer out policy… . You see, I've
never had any special inclination to being publicized and I also knew that
you could not organize in the public press. You might get a lot of lineage,
but you really couldn't organize.”10
The sum of Baker's influence in shaping the outcome of the Raleigh
conference was both strategic and ideological. If the group that came
together on Easter weekend at Shaw was going to become a permanent
organization, a myriad of unanswered questions had to be broached.
What type of structure would it adopt, if any? Would the group become a
coalition of local chapters or a membership organization? Would it be
interracial or all-black? Would it be national or regional? Would it be an
explicitly Christian group, or would it be secular? What place would the
philosophy of nonviolence have in the group's identity? What tone would
the spokespersons set in articulating its politics and purpose? Finally,
would the group tackle only the problem of segregation or, as Ella Baker
urged, would it take on a more expansive political agenda? All of these
were critical questions in the spring of 1960. How they would be
answered was not at all clear. In the end, while many factors informed
the course of events, Ella Baker had more influence than any other single
individual on the development and sustenance of the new organization.
Baker was one of several keynote speakers at the Raleigh conference,
and the only woman to address a plenary session. When her opportunity
came to speak, she urged the students to see their mission as extending
beyond the immediate demand to end segregation. She reiterated this
goal in an article published a few weeks later in the Southern Patriot
summarizing the conference. In her remarks, Baker drew a clear
distinction between the “old guard” leadership, which implicitly included
the four-year-old SCLC along with the more established NAACP, and the
more militant new leadership represented by the students. She warned
against having the sparks the students had ignited smothered by
bureaucratic organizations. She praised the neophyte activists for their
“inclination toward group-centered leadership” rather than toward
following a charismatic individual. In a thinly veiled criticism of King,
she observed that many had felt “frustrations and the disillusionment that
come when the prophetic leader turns out to have heavy feet of clay.”11
In her Patriot article, Baker emphasized the students' unwillingness to
tolerate any treatment by their elders that “smacked of manipulation or
domination.” This was as much a warning from Baker as it was an
account of the sit-in leaders' sentiments.12
In her formal remarks at Shaw and in individual interactions with
participants over the ensuing weeks, Baker gave the students an enlarged
sense of the importance of their actions. The sit-in movement was part of
a worldwide struggle against many forms of injustice and oppression,
she insisted. Baker encouraged the participants to see themselves—not
their parents, teachers, ministers, or recognized race leaders—as the
main catalysts for change. She was trying to pull the student activists
beyond the confines of the South and the nation to grapple with, and
connect to, a large and complex political world. Her comments made
quite an impact on her listeners. Max Heirich, a young white staff person
for the American Friends Service Committee working in Chapel Hill,
had driven over to attend the conference and was overwhelmed by Ella
Baker's presence. “She spoke simply but powerfully. It was as if she was
speaking right to you about such large and important issues. She was
much more effective than the men,” he recalled.13
No one was more impressed by Baker's message and the compelling
image she projected at the conference than Diane Nash. An idealistic
eighteen-year-old, Nash was a native of Chicago and a student at Fisk
University. She had become the leader of and principal spokesperson for
the sit-in movement in Nashville, Tennessee. Nash looked up to the
youthful Reverend James Lawson, who was a political guru for many
Nashville students. But, with few female role models, Nash was
uncertain of her own abilities as a leader and insecure about the
leadership role that she had come to hold. When she went to Raleigh that
weekend, she was looking for reassurance and affirmation. Ella Baker
provided both.
Diane Nash's involvement in the sit-ins in Nashville was her first taste
of politics, and she was both excited and nervous about meeting other
students and civil rights leaders. She drove from Nashville to Raleigh
with a young seminarian named James Bevel, whom she later married
(and divorced), and Marion Barry, soon to be elected the first executive
secretary of the new student organization (and, much later, mayor of
Washington, D.C.). Articulate, poised, and beautiful by conventional
standards, Diane Nash was one of the few young black women leaders
who rose to national visibility in the early months of the student sit-in
movement. By the time she attended the Raleigh meeting, she had faced
down the mayor of Nashville at a press event, braved rowdy mobs,
delivered speeches to large crowds, and given interviews to the national
press—all bold acts of political leadership she had never dreamed of for
herself before February 1960. Yet her sophisticated exterior concealed a
scared and naive young woman who was deeply ambivalent about
assuming the mantle of leadership. When she saw Ella Baker in action,
speaking without a glimmer of self-doubt and exuding confidence with
every gesture, Nash's political self-esteem was buoyed. She was struck
by Baker's self-possession and eloquent command of language. She
recalled thinking to herself, “I'd love to be able to make contributions
like that.”14 Ella Baker became a confidence-builder, role model, and
adviser for Nash as she evolved into one of the most influential young
personalities within the student movement during its first few years.
Raleigh was the launching pad for a new phase of the Black Freedom
Movement and a new phase of Ella Baker's career. Northern-based white
leftists, southern antiracist liberals, and even anticolonialist leaders
abroad followed media coverage of the gathering to see what would
come out of it.
At the end of the weekend, the conference participants formed the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Ella Baker, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Howard Zinn, Connie Curry, and several other
observers at the Raleigh meeting were invited to serve as adult advisers
to the new organization. For King, this meant lending his name to the
effort and attending its formal gatherings. For Baker, it meant much
more: she coordinated the business of the new organization. In her
words, “The writing that took place between the conference in April and
the activities of the group in the summer came out of the office where I
was and much of it I had to do.”15 She typed minutes, drafted internal
documents, maintained a mailing list, kept in phone contact with
interested students, and recruited new ones. She found meeting sites and
office space and secured funds from SCLC and other sympathetic donors.
Although Baker was still being paid by SCLC, she was now working for
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
THE SUMMER OF 1960
At Baker's side for most of the summer of 1960 was the hard-working
and tenacious Jane Stembridge, who had attended the Shaw meeting and
volunteered to take a leave from her studies at Union Theological
Seminary in New York to work for the new organization. Stembridge
was first moved to act after hearing a speech by King in New York City.
His words touched a chord. As a liberal white southerner, she had never
felt at ease with the racism that permeated her childhood world, and now
she had a way to act on that uneasy feeling. Baker and Stembridge did
much of the day-today work to hold the embryonic organization together
during its first few months of life. Baker's leadership and Stembridge's
tireless labor were indispensable at that critical stage. Ella Baker was a
heroine for Jane Stem-bridge, just as she was a model of black female
leadership for Diane Nash.
All of the young people who came into Baker's and SNCC'S orbits in
the 1960s did so at a formative time in their lives, roughly ages eighteen
to twenty-four, when they were enormously impressionable. Most were
searching. They had been living on their own, away from their parents,
for only a short time, if at all. So, they were figuring out their adult
identities in a new way in the midst of trying to figure some other very
important questions about social change and American society. For Jane
Stembridge, coming to grips with her sexuality as a lesbian at a time and
place where “absolutely no one talked about such things,” as she put it
years later, was extremely difficult. In fact, it was “awful” in some ways.
Here she was rearranging her life to be a part of a struggle and she could
not even reveal to her closest co-workers what she was feeling and going
through personally. Like Nash, Stembridge was looking for affirmation
and for role models. She turned first to Lillian Smith, the author of
Strange Fruit, an activist, and a rebel against what it meant to be a
southern white woman in those days. Smith was a militant antiracist, an
outspoken social critic, and a closeted but suspected middle-aged
lesbian. Stembridge visited Smith at her home in Atlanta in search of
counsel and support, but she was quickly turned off by Smith's vitriolic
anticommunism and her insensitivity to some of the personal dynamics
of race. Even though Stembridge never directly came out to Baker and
discussed her sexual orientation, she was “open, and didn't hide anything
consciously.”16 The perceptive Baker did not miss much. Stembridge
found in Baker an accepting mentor whose politics and sensibilities
about social change and her personal open-mindedness were in line with
her own.
Bob Moses, like Diane Nash and Jane Stembridge, was drawn to
Baker's humanistic style of political acumen. A deeply spiritual young
man with a sharp intellect and a perceptive ear, Moses read Camus,
loved math, and wanted to change the world, especially, but not
exclusively, the black world. A resident of New York City, Moses had
not participated in the sit-ins and did not attend the Easter weekend
meeting. Baker deliberately pulled him into the expanding orbit of SNCC
in the summer of 1960, when it was still in the making. From 1961 on,
Moses played a critical role in the organization. He and others who made
a full-time commitment to activism eventually displaced many of the
students who had ignited the sit-in protests in February 1960. Bob
Moses, like his mentor Ella Baker, led the group in a radical democratic
direction.
In 1960, Moses was working as a math teacher at New York City's
prestigious Horace Mann School. He had previously been an
undergraduate at Hamilton College and, briefly, a graduate student at
Harvard University. During his spring break, in the immediate aftermath
of the sit-ins, Moses traveled to Newport News, Virginia, to visit his
uncle, a faculty member at Hampton Institute and an activist in the local
NAACP. While there, he went to hear Wyatt T. Walker, the incoming
director of SCLC, speak about the growing civil rights movement in the
South. Moses had already read about the sit-ins in the mainstream and
black press. Although the student movement was sweeping the region
and plans were already under way to form a southern-based student
organization, Walker said little about them. Moses went home energized
about the southern struggle—but still unaware that SNCC was in
formation.17
After returning to New York, Moses immediately went to the Harlem
SCLC office and became reacquainted with Bayard Rustin, whom he had
met some years before. Rustin, a pacifist, had been a conscientious
objector during World War II, and Moses had sought him out for counsel
when he was confronted with a similar moral dilemma. Moses hung
around SCLC's small Harlem office for a while, where he met and got to
know the veteran leftist organizer and former union leader Jack O'Dell
and other northern supporters of the movement. But he was still itching
to return to the South. So he persuaded Rustin to write a letter of
introduction, which was actually addressed to Ella Baker, that would
open the door for him to go to Atlanta as an SCLC volunteer.18
When Moses arrived in Atlanta in the summer of 1960, he got a room
in the Butler YMCA and reported for duty at the SCLC office on Auburn
Avenue, letter of introduction in hand, eager to throw himself into the
struggle. But, far from feeling he was on the front lines of the resurgent
Black Freedom Movement, Moses quickly realized that there was
virtually no meaningful work for him to do. He rarely even caught a
glimpse of the SCLC leaders. So he spent his time getting acquainted with
Jane Stembridge, hearing about SNCC'S embryonic campaigns, and
learning his way around the city. Stem-bridge and Moses struck up a
friendship right away, talking about religion and philosophy, reminiscing
about their common East Coast ties, and sharing their thoughts about the
ideals that had brought them both to Atlanta. They debated the writings
of philosophers Paul Tillich and Albert Camus and pondered their
relevance to the realities of the agrarian South.
A couple of weeks after Moses arrived, Ella Baker returned to Atlanta
from an extended trip, and things began to look up. Baker and Moses
developed an immediate rapport, beginning a relationship that changed
both of their lives over the coming decades. When Baker first noticed the
bespectacled and pensive-looking Moses sitting around the SCLC offices,
she took an immediate interest in him. As was her manner, she called
him over to her desk one day and began to query him about his life, his
family, and his ideas. Who were his people? Where did he attend school?
What did he want to accomplish? Ella Baker was always interested in
people's life stories, even though she often found it necessary to protect
her own privacy. Her personal interest impressed Bob Moses.
Baker's initial response to Moses stood in stark contrast to his first
meeting with Dr. King. Moses recalled that one day, after weeks of
feeling invisible to the higher-ups in SCLC, King summoned him to his
office and grilled him on his participation in a rally that had been
sponsored by members of Atlanta's white antiracist left. Moses, who had
attended the rally, had been identified in the Atlanta newspapers as an
affiliate of SCLC. To King, this meant bad press for the organization. No
one in SCLC had endorsed the protest, and Moses had inadvertently linked
the group to it. King warned the earnest young student to be more
careful. Unlike Baker, he did not bother to find out who Bob Moses was,
why he had come to the South, or what he had to offer the movement.
His concerns were wholly pragmatic. Moses was sorely disappointed.19
What King's reaction also illustrated was how strictly SCLC sought to
police its public image in 1960, quietly working with leftist allies, like
Rustin, Levison, and Baker, but careful not to tarnish its respectability by
associating too closely in public with those who may have been labeled
subversive by the government.
Baker's and King's differing responses to Moses are telling. King was
focused on external perceptions of the movement and how negative
publicity might undermine SCLC's efforts. He overlooked what Baker
would have regarded as more important: the possible alienation of a
talented young recruit. Baker was not worried about bad publicity,
especially at that stage. She was more concerned with identifying and
developing potential leaders like Moses, who could contribute to the
movement's future, than she was about maintaining an organization's
public profile.
Moses had been exposed to a brand of politics that predisposed him to
progressive ideas and to the direction that the new student movement,
under Baker's influence, was headed. He had attended New York's
Stuyvesant High School during the 1950s, and many of the young people
in his circle had leftist parents. He remembered meeting the radical folk
singer Pete Seeger while visiting the apartment of some friends in
Greenwich Village. The psychiatrist Alvin Pouissant was a high school
classmate of Bob's. According to Moses, Pouissant's father was a black
printer who had a number of left-wing clients and customers, which also
exposed Bob to these ideas in a roundabout way.20
Moses credited his own humble but politically astute father with
instilling in him certain values and sensibilities that he later applied in
his political work. The senior Moses, an educated blue-collar worker in
Harlem for most of his life, always emphasized the integrity of “the
common person.” Bob Moses recalled that his father “viewed himself as
the man on the street … and the person at the bottom.”21 The egalitarian
values Moses learned in childhood from his father were reinforced
during the 1960s by the woman who became his political mother. Baker
did not spoon-feed new ideas to Bob or any other young activist. Rather,
she looked for and connected with individuals who had a predisposition
to the ideas and values she embraced, and she worked with them to
deepen and refine those ideas. When Moses entered the movement, he
admittedly “hadn't worked out any notions of leadership,” but he had an
inclination toward “what people later termed grassroots leadership.”
Baker helped turn that inclination into a conviction.22
Bob Moses became Ella Baker's political apprentice. He was one of
the young people whom she spent a lot of time talking with and listening
to, and he continued in her political tradition—teaching, listening to, and
organizing young people—long after her death.23 Ella and Bob had
similar sensibilities. Both were intellectuals, thoughtful and analytical,
yet at the same time practical and personable. Both were deeply attentive
to ideology and the ideological implications of certain tactical decisions,
but both were equally willing to do the messy, hands-on work necessary
to implement those ideas. “What is the larger picture we are framing
here?” was the implicit, if not explicit, question both of them often
asked. Moses absorbed Baker's message that revolution was an ongoing
process intimately bound up with one's vision of the future and with how
one interacted with others on a daily basis. Moses also shared Baker's
confidence and faith in young people. After leaving SNCC in the mid1960s and living for several years in Tanzania, he became a radical
teacher, in Ella Baker's style and tradition, focused on creative methods
of teaching and learning as a strategy for empowerment and social
change.24
Connie Curry, like Jane Stembridge, immersed herself in the work of
the newly formed student wing of the movement during the summer of
1960. A white antiracist southerner, Curry had attended Agnes Scott
College, where she was introduced to what was called intergroup work
for whites, a euphemism for civil rights and antiracist organizing,
through the YWCA. After college she moved to Atlanta to take a job with
the National Student Association. Curry often felt quite lonely as a
progressive white person in the Jim Crow South, which was nearly as
hostile to antiracist whites as it was to all blacks. Curry was ecstatic to
meet Ella Baker and the interracial group of young people in the sit-in
movement. In 1960-61, Baker used Curry's apartment as a sort of local
youth hostel to accommodate the varied assortment of female volunteers
who floated through Atlanta. Curry was evicted from one apartment
because one of her roommates had entertained a black guest, an act that
was viewed as so scandalous she was forced to move out right away.
Curry officially became one of SNCC'S “adult advisors,” but she was not
much older than the students themselves were. She was typical of a small
minority of white southerners who did not fit into their own
communities, and sometimes even their own families, because of their
open-mindedness about race issues and sympathy with black aspirations
for freedom.25
Baker appreciated the importance of progressive white allies like
Connie Curry, but she understood the even greater importance of
cultivating allies among southern black activists. Baker knew that the
students who started the sit-in movement had to move into other areas of
political activity and forge a broader base of black support throughout
the South if they were going to have a sustained impact. Toward that
end, Baker decided to work with Bob Moses to make links and initiate
contacts that would pull the students away from the lunch counters and
their campuses and into the front lines of the southern battlefields against
racism. She wanted to expose them to the kind of grassroots organizers
she had worked closely with, most recently the SCLC affiliates in
Shreveport and Birmingham and, before that, the activist branches of the
NAACP.
The summer of 1960 was filled with hopefulness and newfound
camaraderie for Baker as well as for the students. Curry remembers
many occasions when the small group of activists deliberated about the
possibilities for the resurgent Black Freedom Movement while eating ice
cream sundaes in the back room of B. B. Beamon's, Atlanta's legendary
black-owned restaurant.26 Baker's personal regard for them endeared
many of the young people in SNCC to her. She was clearly not a peer, but
she was willing to engage them on their turf, not just intellectually but
socially too—over ice cream sundaes, in smoke-filled back rooms, or on
long, uncomfortable rides in jalopies of various sorts. Baker was often
shuttled back and forth to meetings and conferences in Curry's beloved
convertible Karmen Ghia sports car, which Curry emphasized was not a
jalopy, holding onto her hat so it wouldn't fly off. Despite her age and
encroaching health problems, Baker often rejected anything that could
even remotely be construed as special treatment that would put distance
between herself and the students. If they sat in uncomfortable chairs for
long hours debating this or that, so would she. If they walked long
distances, she walked with them at least as far as she could. If they slept
in cramped accommodations on road trips, she did the same.27 Lenora
Taitt-Magubane, a Spelman student who became involved in the
movement through the YWCA and became a dear friend of Ella Baker
near the end of her life, remembered one such instance. The two had
traveled to Albany, Georgia, in 1961 after there had been numerous
arrests of civil rights demonstrators. They were staying at the home of a
local activist, Irene Moore, but there were not enough beds to
accommodate everyone. Lenora offered to give up her bed, but Baker,
then almost sixty, insisted they share the tiny bed since she did not want
anyone to have to sleep on the floor, even though Lenora knew Baker
“hated sleeping in the bed with someone else.”28 Her example, in this
instance and many others, was a lesson in personal egalitarianism that
the young people in SNCC applied to their own organizing efforts with
southern farmers, workers, and youth.
PERSONAL MATTERS
July and August 1960 were especially busy months for Ella Baker. She
was wrapping up loose ends for SCLC, tallying the sales of King's book,
Stride toward Freedom (a task she did not relish), and getting SCLC's files
in order. At the same time, she was helping to launch a brand new
organization. During these months, Baker departed from her usual
pattern by giving greater attention to her own personal affairs. Surgery
for cataracts was followed by enforced rest and a brief vacation with
Anne Braden and her family. Then, in September, her niece Jackie
married Henry Brockington, marking a moment of great fulfillment in
Baker's family life.
Her long neglected health concerned her friends and family more than
it did Baker herself. Like her mother, Baker was plagued with health
problems for her entire life. But she rarely allowed them to slow her
down. She sometimes joked with friends that she was entirely too busy
to get sick. Baker's chronic asthma was a constant source of discomfort
to her. In a period when the health hazards of second-hand smoke were
not well known, she often endured long meetings in smoke-filled rooms,
sitting patiently with a handkerchief over her mouth and quietly gasping
for breath, while impassioned discussions continued on for hours.
Baker's vision, which was seriously impaired by cataracts, was the most
immediate concern. Years of typing, writing, and reading in poorly lit
offices and on trains and busses probably did not help. In the summer of
1960, she finally had the eye surgery she had postponed for months.
Baker took a long overdue vacation while recuperating from her
surgery. She had maintained a hectic schedule since the April meeting,
and by the middle of the summer she was thoroughly exhausted. Many
summers, Baker's only vacation was an extended speaking engagement
in one place or another. Her friend Anne Braden, who always took a
special interest in Baker's physical and psychological well-being,
managed to persuade her to fly to Rhode Island to spend a few days with
her at a wooded cabin owned by some movement friends, the O'Connors.
Anne and Ella sat on the long front porch of the house in the evenings
talking about the direction of the movement and about their own lives
and families. Ella enjoyed a glass of expensive Jack Daniels whiskey—
one of the very few indulgences she allowed herself—as Anne sat next to
her sipping a glass of wine.29 The two women warriors were refueling
themselves physically and emotionally for the battles that lay ahead.
Baker left Rhode Island for a meeting at the Highlander Folk School,
made a brief stop in Atlanta, and then flew to New York for the big
family event: Jackie's wedding. Ella found herself in the ill-fitting role of
the mother of the bride. Her sister Maggie, Jackie's biological mother,
was still alive and even attended the wedding, but she had long before
relinquished her role as Jackie's primary parent.
Baker had raised Jackie since the age of nine. She had watched Jackie
enter high school and excel, experiment with smoking cigarettes,
experience her first kiss, and go on to college. Jackie was influenced
more by her independent, generous, and strong-willed Aunt Ella than by
any other single adult in her life. It was a source of great pride for Ella to
see Jackie all grown up and going out on her own to establish a family.
Ella Baker liked and trusted Henry Brockington, the man Jackie had
chosen to marry. More importantly, she trusted Jackie to be her own
woman and to pursue her own goals in the context of marriage, a
balancing act that Baker herself had struggled to manage. So, amid the
flurry and excitement of political activity that marked the summer of
1960, Baker took time off to return to New York, shop for a dress and, of
course, a hat, and help make catering arrangements. Jackie's wedding
took place at St. Mark's Church in Harlem. The reception was held in the
legendary Audubon ballroom, where Malcolm X (El Haj Malik El
Shabazz) was assassinated four years later while delivering a speech
calling for a reinvigorated militant black movement. On September 17,
1960, the Audubon was the site of a happy family occasion. Baker put
her political concerns and dilemmas aside to relax and enjoy the
celebration. Her family and close personal friends were all there.
It was also good for Ella Baker to see her sister Maggie again. They
had not spent much time together since Ella's move to Atlanta, but
Jackie's wedding was a happy reunion. In a photograph with Jackie
pinning Aunt Ella's corsage on her new suit, Ella is absolutely beaming.
Jackie was her personal success story. Although Ella had not had much
luck in love and marriage, her relationship with Jackie had met all of her
expectations. They remained close until Baker's death a quarter of a
century later. Like a good and loving daughter, Jackie nursed Ella during
her last years. In 1960, as Jackie and Henry set off on their honeymoon
and began a new life together, Ella went back to the love of her life,
political work, and to her growing political family in the South.30
The wedding was a high point in Ella Baker's personal life, but few of
her political associates were invited or even knew about the celebration.
She was familiar with some of the most intimate details of the lives of
her co-workers, especially her younger comrades, but few of them knew
very much about her private side, which she consciously kept separate
from the movement. There were rumors of an ex-husband, but Baker
refrained from discussing her marriage and divorce even with some of
her closest women friends, including Anne Braden. She had a repertoire
of family stories that she shared, usually to make a political point, but the
messy areas of her personal life were off limits.31 It is hard to explain
why she was so guarded about her private life. Perhaps this was her
refuge from the fractious political environment that she inhabited most of
the time. Perhaps she did not want her personal choice of a spouse or
lover to become a matter of public scrutiny within the movement. Or
perhaps she was resisting the ways in which public female figures were
so often defined in conjunction with male partners and in terms of their
sexual identities. Baker wanted to be respected for her work and her
ideas; to open up her personal life to public view might have made her
politically vulnerable. Two of her male political colleagues admitted that
there were whispers and rumors about Ella Baker's sexuality during the
1930s and 1940s. Her marriage was not a widely known fact. She was
“Ella Baker” when she arrived in Harlem as a single woman in 1927, and
she remained “Ella Baker” even after her marriage to Roberts; so, many
of her associates thought she was single the whole time. “A strong single
woman always leads to rumors,” remarked John Henrik Clarke, “but
none of that stuff was true about Ella.”32
AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL OF
WOMANHOOD
Most young women entering the Black Freedom Movement during the
early 1960s knew very little about Ella Baker's personal life. Instead,
they were awe inspired by her public example as they sought to construct
their own identities as independent activist women.33 Many of them had
to contend with circumscribed notions of middle-class black womanhood
passed down from their families and teachers. Even those from workingclass and poor backgrounds, whose mothers and grandmothers were
formidable figures, had been influenced by the socially conservative
gender messages from churches and schools. Although some families
encouraged their daughters' activism, many young women were told by
relatives, ministers, and school officials that protesting and getting
arrested were simply “not ladylike” and therefore unacceptable.
Fortunately for the movement, many of them did not listen.
Baker offered an alternative image of womanhood that many young
women had not previously encountered. As Dorie Ladner, who organized
with SNCC in Mississippi, observed, “I never knew anyone quite like
Miss Baker.”34 Her external appearance was reserved, even a bit
conservative. She was a small, brown-skinned woman with a flawless
complexion, sharp features, a commanding voice, and a hearty laugh.
Her deep, almost baritone voice belied her diminutive frame. Her hair
was generally pulled back, often tucked neatly into a hat. She dressed
simply in skirts, suits, or dresses, usually in muted tones, never wearing
anything revealing or the least bit flamboyant, and no makeup, save for a
scant bit of lipstick now and then. Juanita Abernathy, whose husband
Ralph was an SCLC leader, remembered gray suits as Baker's typical
uniform during her years on the SCLC staff. Juanita speculated that “this
is how she had to dress to fit in with the men” and perhaps to allay their
wives' concerns that she was interested in anything but business.35
Baker never developed much of a personal relationship with Coretta
Scott King, perhaps because of her deepening criticisms of Martin, but
she did with Juanita Abernathy, which was a typical practice of hers. She
had made a habit of reaching out to the wives of the male political
leaders with whom she worked, even if the woman in the family was not
herself explicitly an activist. Juanita played more of a background role in
the SCLC, but Baker always acknowledged her presence and welcomed
her contributions. Sometimes huddled in the dining room of Juanita's
home with the men, Baker would consciously excuse herself and go pay
her respects to Juanita. When she was based in Atlanta and Abernathy
and King were still in Montgomery, she stayed at the Abernathys' home
during visits to the city. This was another opportunity to share her ideas
and observations with Juanita. The two women bonded during these
visits; and while they were never close friends, there was mutual respect
and much cordiality.36
Baker situated herself in the dining room debates of the men and
kitchen conversations of the women, and through her roles in these often
mutually exclusive discussions she came to occupy a category and style
all her own. In interviews of any real length, those who knew her well
invariably describe Baker as someone with a “presence.” “She
commanded attention just by the way she came into a room and the way
she carried herself,” SNCC activist Ivanhoe Donaldson said. According to
Lenora Taitt-Magubane, “She just had a certain presence.”37 In Bob
Moses's words, “She had this black woman's manner, and she carried
that with her into the dangerous arena of radical politics.”38 It was partly
the carriage and comportment that Anna had taught her—a reminder to
always walk into a room as if you belonged. She retained that confidence
of movement and she used it. Baker traveled in all-male circles, and she
sometimes found herself in all-white contexts, but she never hesitated.
By the 1950s, she maneuvered within these spaces as a middle-aged
black woman with her purse tucked under her arm, her hat carefully
placed, and her good southern manners. To Moses, a woman taking the
dignified and self-respecting manner that was a familiar feature of black
family life into the rugged political domain was nothing short of
revolutionary.
A white male co-worker found her persona more puzzling. She “was
warm” but always had a certain “formality” about her, Howard Zinn
observed; “she was friendly enough but you never felt you could go up
and give her a hug.”39 Ivanhoe Donaldson agreed: she was “always
dignified, never casual,” and it was disarming “because physically she
was not threatening.”40 Baker kept her boundaries between what was
public and private, formal and informal. But she was not rigid about it.
Dorothy Dawson (Burlage), a SNCC volunteer and staff member, once
“slipped” and called her “Ella” (instead of Miss Baker), a mistake
Dawson immediately regretted, feeling she had transgressed a boundary.
Baker reassured her, “People know when they are ready to call me Ella.
Don't worry about it.”41
To young women, black and white, Baker embodied the possibility of
escaping the restrictions that defined conventional femininity.
Authoritative yet unassuming, self-confident and assertive, forcing
others to take her seriously simply by presuming that they would, Baker
was a revelation. At the time, few of these young women thought they
could actually emulate Ella Baker. She was a larger than life figure more
than twice their ages. Still, because of her, many young women in the
movement did realize that they could define their own identities rather
than be defined by others, and in the course of their work with SNCC they
developed new ways of interacting with women and men, with other
young people and their elders, both in the movement and in the larger
black community. Decades after their involvement in the movement,
dozens of women remember their lives were touched at a formative stage
by a woman who, through her example, showed them a different way of
being in the world. Prathia Hall, an African American woman who went
south from Philadelphia in 1962 and lived and worked in Terrell County,
Georgia, for a year, remembered quite vividly the impact Baker had on
her. Qualifying a recollection by saying she did not mean to actually
compare herself to Baker, she nevertheless said, “I would see myself in
her … I was a wandering pilgrim … [and] the more I talked to her, the
more I understood myself.”42
Ella Baker was the comforting, nurturing, rock-solid mother to the
movement. Yet there was nothing maternal about her in the traditional
sense of that term. She was a militant activist, an insurgent intellectual,
and a revolutionary, descriptors that are usually associated with men
rather than women and with youth rather than the middle-aged. Baker's
complex, carefully crafted persona enabled her to cross gender and
generational boundaries within the movement. Even in retrospect, she
defies categorization.
Baker maintained a dignified public self-presentation partly as a form
of camouflage that allowed her to operate in male-dominated and
sometimes mainstream political circles. She was a freethinker at heart,
accepting of alternative lifestyles, personal eccentricities, and violations
of social etiquette.43 For example, in contrast to her ever-so-sober public
posture, Baker frequently enjoyed a stiff shot of bourbon or a glass of red
wine at the end of the day. She was not as prim and proper as her
conservative gray suits suggested. Baker would talk comfortably about
almost any subject, including sex. She often gently teased her young
colleagues about their romantic interests or inquired about the lack
thereof.44
The growing irreverence for conventional standards of morality and
respectability among SNCC members disturbed some of their more
moderate adult supporters, but it did not bother Baker. Virginia Durr, a
white civil rights activist in Montgomery, complimented Baker on her
ability to socialize with the young people and tolerate what Durr viewed
as their “wild” behavior. Baker responded that she “was prepared to
forgo manners” for the sake of the larger politics that were at stake.45
She was, in fact, prepared to do more than that. She was instrumental in
SNCC'S rejection of bourgeois respectability as a defensive political
strategy, a rejection that opened the organization up to historically
marginalized sectors of the black community. When SNCC broke with the
largely middle-class, male-centered leadership of existing civil rights
organizations, it stripped away the class-based and gender-biased notions
of who should and could give leadership to the movement and the black
community. Some of the manners and decorum that Durr valued were
evident at the Shaw conference in April 1960. Within a year, a visible
change was well under way. The young activists' dress, comportment,
and language changed considerably, making the organization more
welcoming to those traditionally excluded from formal leadership
circles. They donned blue jeans and overalls instead of skirts and suits,
resembling in their dress workers and peasants of the South rather than
preachers and teachers.
Baker encouraged and affirmed the young people's boldness, their
growing radicalism, and their risk-taking. Her reasoned approval was
important to them. Diane Nash recalls that, as the movement intensified,
many of her own relatives were worried about her safety. “Older people
would look at you and say you were young and you would calm down
when you matured. So, she was the first older person I had known who
was so progressive. And I needed that reinforcement. It was important
that someone like her thought we were right. It was really important
when things got hot and heavy.”46
MOLDING A NEW ORGANIZATION
Ella Baker gave up her plans to move back to Harlem after leaving SCLC
in the fall of 1960, deciding to stay in the South in order to work as
closely as possible with the young sit-in activists in SNCC. She still
needed a paying position. Although SCEF had offered her a full-time job,
which she was tempted to accept, she ultimately declined it because she
thought it would demand too much of her time. Aware of Baker's need
for autonomy and some flexibility in hours in order to continue her
unpaid work with the students, her friend Rosetta Gardner helped her get
a job with the YWCA. Gardner was typical of Baker's lesser-known
female friends and admirers. She supported the movement but never
became a leader herself. As one Atlanta activist who worked alongside
the two women remarked, “Rosetta just loved Ella.”47 Women like
Gardner admired Baker's competence, her self-possession, her intellect,
and her compassion. Above all, they admired her courage to forge
another path and assert herself in all kinds of situations. These are the
things that most of Baker's close associates loved about her. So, Rosetta
did what she could to make it possible for Ella to do the work that was
important to her. Ella in turn used her position at the Y to build, nurture,
and protect SNCC. Lawrence Guyot recalled that Baker obtained YWCA
and YMCA membership cards for young civil rights workers as soon as
they came south to give them local identification in case they were
stopped by the police and were accused of being outside agitators.48
More significantly, she traveled around the South conducting workshops
for the Y on human relations, which essentially meant trying to foster
greater interracial understanding—not as simple a task as one might
think given the racially polarized context of the 1960s South. It was
through this work that she met and subsequently recruited to SNCC a
number of serious, idealistic young women searching for meaningful
ways to apply themselves.49
In describing her southern-based work with the YWCA in a 1962
report, Baker used the metaphor of planting and cultivation to describe
the slow methodical process of bringing young people into political
consciousness. She wrote of planting “first the seed,” alluding to the
outreach recruitment and orientation of new activists, which would
nurture their motivation to want to make a difference. Part two of her
report, entitled “Then the Blade,” described the first rumblings of
political activity among “Y women,” some of whom had participated in
desegregation sit-ins. This was the first visible result of the seeds having
been planted. Next, in Baker's narrative of organic leadership
development, “the full corn appears.” This section describes the need for
creating concrete channels for “meaningful social action.”50 The same
metaphor could have applied to her work with SNCC.
Ella Baker once confided in Vincent Harding, her friend and colleague,
that if she ever wrote her memoir, which she never managed to do, she
would entitle it “Making a Life, Not Making a Living,” because while
she did a very good job of the former, she barely accomplished the
latter.51 In the summer of 1960, she made the same choices as before:
finding a job that barely paid the bills, she focused instead on creating a
meaningful life for herself by building a movement. The movement was
more important to Baker than religion, money, or even romantic love; the
movement had become her life and her extended family.
Baker was relieved finally to be free from her obligations to SCLC, and
she was excited about the emerging student movement. The young
people's optimism and sheer energy were uplifting. When Baker was
immersed in this kind of struggle, she felt most alive and her creative
talents could soar. She had always enjoyed the challenge of building
something new: the YNCL in the 1930s, local NAACP branches in the
1940s, even SCLC at the outset. These had been the high points of her
political career before 1960. Inherent in Baker's philosophy, however,
was the recognition that no organization should last forever. Each must
yield to something new as historical circumstances changed. Just as SCLC
was yielding, albeit unwillingly, to SNCC, so SNCC would have to be
prepared to make room for whatever new, grassroots organizations it
might help to create. These politics and sensibilities pervaded SNCC from
its inception.
Baker realized that the radical pulse she had detected needed to be
sustained, cultivated, and propagated. In the summer of 1960, as several
leaders of the emergent organization went off to make speeches to the
political elites of the Democratic and Republican Party Conventions in
Los Angeles and Chicago, she assigned Bob Moses to meet and speak
with an entirely different constituency, one that Baker thought was far
more important than national elected officials. She freed Moses up from
his mundane clerical duties at SCLC and dispatched him on a bus tour of
Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana to do outreach for SNCC and to
recruit local activists of all ages to attend the group's October
conference. Baker had another objective in mind as well. She wanted to
put the students in touch as quickly as possible with a set of elders who
represented a different class background and political orientation than
the ministerial clique heading SCLC.52 This was her way of planting the
seeds.
Ella Baker placed great confidence in the smart and earnest Bob
Moses. In him, she saw the makings of the kind of leader she herself had
striven to become: modest, principled, and able to empower others
through the force of example. Moses did not disappoint her. Baker wrote
down the names of contacts in each state, and Moses set off for a
monthlong journey with a bus ticket and a list of telephone numbers in
his pocket. The contacts he made that summer laid the foundation for
some of SNCC'S most important community organizing work.
The October conference of SNCC, when it officially formed, was the
culmination of Baker's efforts over the spring and summer to help build a
permanent organization. Marion Barry, the confident and charismatic
young chemistry graduate student from Fisk, stepped down as chair, and
Chuck McDew, a stocky, dark-skinned former football player from South
Carolina State with a quick wit and disarming sense of humor, was
confirmed to replace him. Others were jockeying for the position, but
Baker had her eyes on McDew. She had probably been observing him in
meetings and recognized his ability to gently but effectively steer the
organization forward without indulging his own ego. McDew had to
leave the October conference early, so he was not even present when he
was nominated and elected as the group's new leader. “Ella Baker made
me chairman,” McDew later recalled. She persuaded him to accept the
nomination and urged others to support it. This was a little behind-thescenes meddling, but Baker was convinced she was placing the
organization in fair and able hands.53
Several issues of a newsletter, which Baker suggested they call the
Student Voice, were published during the spring and summer. The group
acquired temporary office space in one corner of the SCLC office on
Auburn Avenue and hired one staff person, Jane Stembridge.
Representatives made their mark on national electoral politics by
testifying before the two major party conventions. Student leaders also
met with the nation's top civil rights leaders, from King and the ministers
of SCLC to the national officials of the NAACP. Moses established contact
with older activists who were conducting their own campaigns and with
other students throughout the Deep South who had not been directly
involved in the original wave of sit-ins. Already the movement was
growing beyond its circumscribed beginnings.
Early on, one of SNCC'S difficult decisions concerned the plans for the
October conference and involved Baker's friend Bayard Rustin. The
Packinghouse Workers Union had pledged some funds to help finance
the conference. When the union officials learned that Rustin was a
scheduled speaker, they threatened to pull the money because of his
radical past. Nervous about alienating new allies, especially funders, but
not terribly scrupulous about retaining existing ones, SNCC awkwardly
disinvited Rustin. The details of this decision remain unclear. There is no
indication that Baker intervened to question or challenge the decision,
and she likely had been instrumental in obtaining the funds since she was
handling most of the outreach and fund-raising over the summer.
Stembridge, however, was highly upset and feared SNCC was abandoning
its principles before it had even gotten off the ground. She abruptly
resigned but declined to make a public issue of the matter. Years later,
she reasoned that it was probably as much Rustin's sexuality as his leftist
past that caused the union to reject him and prompted SNCC not to stand
up in his defense. For Baker's part, she was either opting to choose her
battles or, in a pragmatic vein, allowing the students to make their own
mistakes as they groped to define themselves. Still, Stembridge was
“sure” that “Ella would not have approved of this if she had been asked.”
The SNCC of 1960 took the easy way out. Four years later, the outcome
would have likely been quite different.54 Rustin, used to being mistreated
by colleagues, had developed a thick skin. He continued to advise and
work with SNCC despite the affront.
Throughout 1960 and early 1961, SNCC staged sit-ins and stand-ins at
lunch counters, bus stations, movie theaters, and other segregated public
facilities and mounted support campaigns for protesters who were
arrested. The group also coordinated Christmas boycotts of segregated
businesses in December 1960. Meanwhile, bitter debates and personal
power struggles embroiled the more established civil rights leadership,
even though they maintained the appearance of unity in public. Baker
felt that much of this wrangling was attributable to a kind of egocentrism
and organizational competition that she desperately hoped would not
infect SNCC, but the young organization was inescapably drawn into the
quarrel.
Roy Wilkins of the NAACP was upset that Martin Luther King's
supporters were portraying SCLC as the vanguard of the civil rights
movement. Wilkins was particularly outraged when Jim Lawson, a sit-in
leader and ally of King, was quoted in the New York Times as dismissing
the NAACP as “a black bourgeois club.”55 Both SCLC and SNCC tried to
distance themselves from these comments, and Lawson claimed that his
words were taken out of context. In another political skirmish, Harlem
congressman Adam Clayton Powell harshly criticized both Wilkins and
King for the protests that occurred outside the Democratic National
Convention in August. Powell threatened to spread erroneous rumors
about King if he did not sever his ties with Bayard Rustin, whose leftleaning politics Powell objected to. Rustin was a socialist, not a
communist, but he was still labeled a “red” by those who did not care
about the distinction between one type of leftist and another. However,
the nature of Powell's threat, which was that he was going to leak the
false rumor that King and Rustin were lovers, suggests that his dislike of
Rustin had as much to do with homophobia as with anticommunism,
especially since Powell himself had a radical political past. This is what
movement infighting had come to.
In the midst of all this animus and rancor, Ella Baker accompanied a
small delegation of SNCC leaders and several members of SCLC to a
meeting with NAACP officials to try to clear the air. The response was
lukewarm, but the fact that the meeting was held signaled the student
group's growing reputation as an organization to be reckoned with in
national black politics.
Through the summer of 1960 and the winter of 1960-61, a core of
about twenty SNCC activists huddled together in a series of meetings to
map their future course. While the work in Mississippi was still being
contemplated, there were continuing sparks of direct action protest that
were inspired by the 1960 sit-ins. One such spark was in Rock Hill,
South Carolina, in the early months of 1961. A group of young people
had been agitating there for months, picketing, conducting sit-ins, and
getting themselves arrested. Finally, they decided to up the ante and
refuse bail. They sent out a call to others to join them. The coordinating
committee of SNCC was in a meeting at the Butler Y in Atlanta when
word of the Rock Hill stance came. A group immediately latched onto
the idea and prepared to go. Ella Baker went along to inspect the
situation, visit those who had already been arrested, and make sure
parents, lawyers, and the media were contacted. She and Connie Curry
stayed with a local minister who was supportive of the protests, and the
two women drove back to Atlanta two days later to get the word out to
allies and the press. Rock Hill was SNCC'S first collective protest action
after its founding, and Baker was there to urge the students on and help
minimize their losses.56
FREEDOM RIDES
The following spring, SNCC was propelled into a much more visible
national spotlight by its involvement in the Freedom Rides. The rides
were begun in April 1961 by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a
northern-based civil rights group, to desegregate interstate transportation.
Still reeling from their stay in the Rock Hill jail, SNCC members looked
to the Freedom Rides as their next challenge. Interracial teams of
freedom riders took busses from the North to the South and attempted to
use waiting rooms and restrooms in violation of the “Whites Only” and
“Colored” signs that were posted everywhere. Southern segregationists'
response to this campaign was swift and vicious. Vigilantes firebombed
busses and angry mobs pummeled the freedom riders, threatening them
with death and beating some protesters within inches of their lives. Even
the U.S. Justice Department officials who were sent South to observe the
civil rights protests and the news reporters who were assigned to cover
them were caught up in the violence; some of them were also beaten
severely by white mobs. Several freedom riders were hospitalized after
an especially bloody melee in Anniston, Alabama. Fearing that the next
attack might be fatal, core leaders then called off the rides.57
So that the protesters would not appear to be caving in to vigilante
violence, brazen SNCC activists immediately intervened to continue the
Freedom Rides. A determined Diane Nash flew to Birmingham to be part
of a team to coordinate a resumption of the rides. SNCC activists, such as
John Lewis, a Nashville student who would become SNCC'S chairman and
later a member of Congress, volunteered for the dangerous assignment.
When the rides resumed, so did the violence. The situation provoked a
clash between civil rights activists and the new administration in the
White House. John F. Kennedy, the son of Irish immigrants and the
nation's first Catholic president, had been elected in 1960 with strong
African American support by promising to be an ally of civil rights and
racial equality. The spectacle of violence in reaction to the Freedom
Rides and Kennedy's fairly slow response to the open violation of federal
law caused many movement activists to question how strong an ally the
young president was really going to be. This distrust of the federal
government deepened as the struggle in the South intensified over the
next few years.
Ella Baker did not participate directly in the 1961 Freedom Rides. In
1947, she and her close friend Pauli Murray had volunteered to engage in
the same kind of action during the Journey of Reconciliation, but they
were rebuffed because they were women.58 This time, even though she
was still not a rider, she would not be excluded. In daily contact with
Diane Nash, who was on the front lines, Baker dispatched a written
critique and analysis to the committee coordinating the rides, raising
issues about publicity, future strategies, and what she viewed as bungled
negotiations with Attorney General Robert Kennedy.59 Baker insisted
that a better media and outreach strategy had to be crafted: “Although
one can understand that the demands upon the committee in recruiting
and processing riders would consume a great deal of time and energy,
one is, nevertheless, also aware that the full value of the Freedom Rides
could only be realized in proportion to the degree to which an aroused
and vocal public made its voice felt.”60 She went on to discuss the
committee's mistake in its meeting with Robert Kennedy, on which she
had been briefed, probably by Nash, after the fact. “It would seem clear
to me,” she chided, “that the point to have been concentrated on in the
conference with the Attorney General was not that of seeking his aid to
release persons from jail directly [since they had declined bond already
to make a point] but that of urging action in the enforcement of existing
laws and regulations which prohibited segregation practices in interstate
commerce especially.”61 She pointed out that Robert Kennedy had
already noted this contradiction in some of his public comments to the
media as a way to get himself off the hook.
It is unclear if Baker ever received a formal reply to her letter, but a
three-page typed memo from someone as well connected and influential
on the grassroots level as Baker would not have been taken lightly by the
committee coordinating the rides. Her motive for such a formal and
forceful intervention, as opposed to her preferred mode of
communication by telephone, is not fully clear. On the last page of the
document, however, there is a hint that this was a gesture to bolster
Nash's authority and confidence and to protect SNCC from other
organizations that may have wanted to claim the Freedom Rides as their
own organizational victory. In this regard, she wrote: “What coordination
is to be expected or exacted in connection with public appeals for
financial support? All of us, I am confident, will have to agree that the
Freedom Rides are the primary basis on which recent contributions to
constituent agencies have been made. Therefore, it would appear that the
question of stewardship in the handling of public funds is one that
deserves more attention than may have been given.”62 She then
demanded to know what would happen to “the students who are
spending the longest periods in jail [and] will be in need of money for
maintaining themselves and for scholarships next school term. Where
will this come from?”63 In other words, since SNCC had salvaged the
Freedom Rides and provided most of the courageous volunteers, it
deserved its rightful place in the leadership and its share of funds to
further advance its work.64
Eventually, federal authorities had no choice but to offer some
protection to the unflagging freedom riders, whose bloody and bandaged
faces appeared on nightly television newscasts across the country.
Attorney General Kennedy, brother of the president, cut a deal with local
officials in Mississippi, but the deal compromised rather than aided the
activists' immediate goals. They were protected, but only by being taken
into police custody and charged with violating Mississippi's segregation
ordinances, which prevented the protest from continuing. Hundreds of
protesters eventually served jail time in Mississippi's notorious
Parchman Prison as a result of the so-called protection they were
provided. Among those prisoners was Ruby Doris Smith, who later
recalled the experience as a transformative moment in her life. It was
also a watershed in SNCC'S political maturation.65
In November 1961, after dozens of freedom riders had been beaten,
some nearly to death, and while dozens more were still imprisoned, the
Interstate Commerce Commission finally mandated the full
desegregation of all interstate travel facilities, implementing a Justice
Department ruling made in September. The freedom riders felt at least
partly vindicated. Now SNCC had a concrete national victory to its credit.
SNCC activists had demonstrated determination and courage under fire.
And they had garnered visibility and recognition as a major political
force in the growing civil rights movement. After 1961, SNCC members
were increasingly viewed as the movement's shock troops. They were
able to quickly mobilize people to go to sites of intensified racial
conflict: Birmingham in 1963, Selma in 1965, and James Meredith's
short-circuited one-man march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson,
Mississippi, in the summer of 1966. And the activists were willing to
take on difficult and dangerous organizing challenges-such as voter
registration in the Mississippi Delta—that other civil rights groups were
unwilling to touch.
In the summer of 1961, after a difficult first year, SNCC activists came
together to grapple with the question of the political course the
organization should take. Smaller groups had met in June in Louisville
and in July in Baltimore, but it was the August meeting at the Highlander
Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, itself an institution under siege
and soon to be closed down because of its radical and antiracist politics,
that was the most intense. Highlander was the site of many historic
meetings. This gathering included new people, discussed new proposals,
and faced new political challenges. The political landscape in the country
was changing rapidly, and the young people in SNCC were changing as
well. One impulse was to do more of the same, to continue nonviolent
direct action tactics on an ever more massive scale until the last bastions
of segregation fell before the onslaught. After all, the tactic had been
successful, although the victories were purchased at a high human cost.
Some veterans of the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides wanted to move
beyond the demand for desegregation and the tactic of nonviolent direct
action. The number of people who were willing to risk their lives to
achieve desegregation was limited, and segregated public transportation
and accommodations were not the only, or even the most important,
forms of oppression that southern blacks faced. The SNCC activists
wondered whether they could confront those in power over such issues
as citizenship rights and economics.
Layered on top of everything else was the question of allies and
affiliations. By attending the national conference of the Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) in June, Chuck McDew, Casey Hayden, and
Bob Zellner had linked SNCC to the nascent antiwar movement. Baker
was working with Myles Horton to defend the Highlander School against
the threat of closure, and in so doing she linked SNCC to the southern
white left that had been one of the targets of government red-baiting.
Even more significant than the Highlander connection was SNCC'S
deepening relationship with SCEF, which Baker had largely facilitated and
encouraged. Anne Braden had attended most of SNCC'S meetings, and
SCEF, at Ella Baker's urging, had pledged an annual contribution to SNCC'S
budget. On the liberal front, politicians attached to foundation funding
sources were also vying for SNCC'S attention.
As it tried to chart its own course, SNCC was presented with an
opportunity to receive funds from several liberal foundations, including
the Taconic Foundation, if it joined a Voter Education Project to be
administered by the Southern Regional Council. This project was
strongly supported by the Kennedy administration. With a hefty residue
of suspicion left over from the federal government's response to the
Freedom Rides, SNCC activists debated the White House's motives. The
Kennedys may well have been sympathetic to civil rights in principle,
but they also had a direct interest in promoting voter registration. A
campaign that added thousands of new voters to the rolls, most of whom
were likely to vote Democratic, would certainly increase the
administration's chances of reelection. Some SNCC members thought that
such an intimate involvement with electoral politics would compromise
the organization's values and lessen its effectiveness. They felt that the
Democrats' obvious opportunism should not be rewarded with
cooperation. At one point, the controversy threatened to split the young
organization wide open.66
Bob Moses had come to the conclusion that the disenfranchisement of
poor southern blacks was the cutting-edge issue the movement needed to
address. He was not so naive as to think that voting would solve all the
problems African Americans faced, but he did become convinced,
strongly influenced by Amzie Moore, that their oppression hinged in
large part on their total political powerlessness. Moses could not attend
the Highlander meeting, but Charles McDew, Charles Sherrod, and
Charles Jones were in favor of the voter registration project and argued
for that position in the meeting. In contrast, Diane Nash and many of the
Nashville activists had retained an almost spiritual investment in the
tactic of nonviolent direct action. Becoming involved in the messy
business of electoral politics, they concluded, would take the group away
from its strength and the moral high ground that they felt the protests
embodied. John Lewis feared that the “voter registration push by the
government was a trick to take the steam out of the movement, to slow it
down.”67 Passions were heated; tensions were high; and some of the
participants felt that the only way both factions could remain true to their
convictions was to part ways.68
Baker vehemently disagreed with the formation of two organizations.
And it was her aggressive intervention that calmed the situation, abated
the rancor, and preserved unity. “I opposed the split as serving the
purpose of the enemy,” she recalled years later.69 The importance of this
intervention in SNCC'S decision making is generally acknowledged, even
by those who remain unaware of the crucial role Baker played at many
other moments of decision. She understood that the two approaches
being proposed were not mutually exclusive. While she leaned in the
direction of expanding the scope of SNCC'S work and activities to include
voting rights, she knew from her recent experience with SCLC's Crusade
for Citizenship and from her years with the NAACP that organizing for
voting rights did not preclude direct action. In fact, any attempt to
register black voters would precipitate confrontations with white
registrars and public officials in small towns and big cities. As both sides
stated their case with great fervor, Baker saw that if some compromise
were not reached, the group was headed for an even more serious crisis.
She stood up and spoke forcefully in the meeting, calling for the
formation of two wings of one organization. Rather than two
organizations, one wing would focus on direct action and the other on
voter education and registration. Nash would head the direct action
campaign, and Charles Jones would coordinate the voting rights
project.70 Not everyone was completely won over to the idea, but Baker
made a compelling case. No one was prepared to stand up in a meeting
and argue vehemently against her.
Although the compromise appeared to give equal weight to both
positions, this decision to expand the group's political agenda began the
process of redirecting SNCC'S energies in significant ways. The shift from
transitory, high-profile events like the sit-ins and freedom rides to
protracted, day-to-day grassroots organizing in local communities was a
significant turning point. Baker insisted that a movement was a web of
social relationships. Charismatic leaders could rally an anonymous mass
of followers to turn out for a single event or series of events; millions
could watch television coverage of heroic actions by a brave few or
speeches by mesmerizing orators; but that was mobilization, not
organization.71 In order to be effective organizers in a particular
community, Baker argued, activists had to form relationships, build trust,
and engage in a democratic process of decision making together with
community members. The goal was to politicize the community and
empower ordinary people. This was Baker's model, and in 1961 it
became SNCC'S model.72
From the spring of 1960 through the summer of 1961, the new student
movement and the group that emerged out of it toughened and matured
tactically and ideologically. In the beginning, SNCC was not Baker's ideal
organization. As a result of the Rock Hill jail action, the Freedom Rides,
and its growing reputation for boldness, SNCC'S practices and philosophy
became more recognizably similar to Baker's own vision and values. But
exactly what were those political values? Dorothy Miller (Zellner), a
young white leftist from New York, who worked in SNCC'S Atlanta office,
admired Ella Baker but always found her politics “a bit of a mystery.”73
What Dorothy really meant by this was that she could not precisely
situate Baker within the various ideological tendencies of the left, and
Baker was neither a nationalist nor a liberal.74 She defied orthodoxy, and
her views transcended traditional political categories.
Since Baker never wrote an organizing manual or an ideological
treatise, her theory was literally inscribed in her daily work—her
practice. Some of the most powerful political lessons that she taught
were through example, which represented an articulation of her
unwritten theory in a conscious set of actions and practices. In no sense
an armchair radical, Baker pursued a politics of action more than of
words. The concept of political “praxis,” meaning the marriage of theory
and practice, is a helpful way to try to map Baker's political ideas on the
bumpy landscape of her work of more than half a century.75
Baker had enormous confidence in the knowledge base of poor and
oppressed communities and in the intellectual and analytic capacities of
people without formal academic training. This was in part what she
modeled in her own exchanges with students, sharecroppers, and
movement co-workers. Because she and other women did clerical work,
it was assumed that they could not think, analyze, and articulate. Baker
rejected the artificial division between mental and manual labor. It was,
she said, a problem that “so many people who are ‘not educated’ always
defer to those who have got book learning.”76 She spelled out this
problem in the movement's own practice: “The clerical people are the
people who take the dictation, … put it on paper … you don't expect
them to be the ones to have the ideas … it's not a given.”77 Baker made
this observation critically, suggesting that there should be no distinct
intellectual leadership; rather, thinking and analysis should be
incorporated into all aspects of movement work. She was willing to run
the mimeograph machine and type letters, but she was just as determined
to offer historical insights and theoretical critiques to the process.
Ella Baker earned the incontestable position of resident elder and
intellectual mentor of SNCC during its first six years of existence. Her
ideas and teachings permeated the group's discussions, shaped its ethos,
and set its tone. She was consulted on issues ranging from strategy and
analysis to logistics and fund-raising on an almost daily basis. As Jim
Forman, executive secretary of SNCC, later remarked, “Throughout the
decade of the sixties, many people helped to ignite or were touched by
the creative fire that was SNCC without appreciating the generating force
of Ella Jo Baker.”78
Even though the national media never cast the spotlight on Baker's
political career in the 1960s, her colleagues and coworkers fully
appreciated the contribution she made. When Howard Zinn, a historian
and movement activist, published SNCC: The New Abolitionists, the first
account of the organization's development, he dedicated the book to
Baker. In his words, she was “more responsible than any other single
individual for the formation of the new abolitionists [SNCC] as an
organized group.”79 In the 1960s, her lifelong friend Pauli Murray, a
keen observer of progressive politics, praised Ella Baker as “the gal who
I think has done so much for spearheading the revolutionary movement
among Negroes in the South.”80 Stokely Carmichael, another SNCC
leader, recalled that by the mid-1960s Baker “was just so overwhelming
and ubiquitous in SNCC that it seems as if she was always present.”81
9 THE EMPOWERMENT OF AN
INDIGENOUS SOUTHERN BLACK
LEADERSHIP, 1961–1964
One of the major emphases of SNCC, from the beginning, was that of
working with indigenous people, not working for them, but trying to
develop their capacity for leadership.
Ella Baker, 1967
Between 1961 and 1964, SNCC launched over a dozen projects in rural
and urban communities across the South. Young civil rights activists
participated in grassroots struggles in places like Pine Bluff, Arkansas;
Danville, Virginia; Albany, Georgia; and, later, Lowndes County,
Alabama, and the heart of the Mississippi Delta. In some cases, SNCC
supported and helped sustain desegregation and voter rights projects that
were already under way. In other places, where protest campaigns had
stagnated or had been halted after violent reprisals, SNCC organizers had
to start over, identifying people who were ready to take action, helping
them select targets and tactics, and offering them whatever resources
they could mobilize to confront their adversaries. Whether SNCC sent
activists into a community to support an ongoing campaign or to
reinvigorate a local movement, its approach to organizing was a direct
outgrowth of Ella Baker's teachings and represented a major shift in the
way Black Freedom Movement groups operated in the South.
Ella Baker's unofficial political curriculum was not the only
contributing factor to the formation of SNCC'S radical democratic
approach, but it was a major one. Her message was simple and subtle.
She urged SNCC organizers to suppress their own egos and personal and
organizational ambitions as much as possible and to approach local
communities with deference and humility. She stressed the need to resist
organizational chauvinism or any attempts to make proprietary claims on
political campaigns that might emerge from their efforts. Finally, she
rejected the notion that the black middle class had special claims on
leadership of the black community. Even though most of the black youth
who were attracted to SNCC in the early 1960s were not wealthy, and
some came from very modest means, virtually all of them were college-
educated and consequently had social, if not material, capital. Baker
appreciated the skills and resources that educated black leaders brought
to the movement, but she urged SNCC organizers to look first to the
bottom of the class hierarchy in the black community, not the top, for
their inspiration, insights, and constituency.1 Baker influenced SNCC'S
emergent politics and values primarily by exposing the young activists to
people and situations that represented alternative adult leadership—
people who would demonstrate to them first-hand the willingness,
ability, and determination of oppressed people to resist and overcome
their oppression while speaking for themselves: people who were not
lawyers or ministers but just as capable as a Martin Luther King or a
Thurgood Marshall.2 Nothing made this point more dramatically than the
struggle in Fayette County, Tennessee.
SOLIDARITY WITH THE BLACK POOR IN
FAYETTE COUNTY
In the fall of 1960, SNCC'S national leadership, with Ella Baker's strong
encouragement, began building ties to the constituency that soon became
the focal point of its southern organizing efforts: the rural and smalltown black poor. In August 1959, a group of impoverished black tenant
farmers in Fayette County (and later in adjacent Haywood County), a
cotton-producing region of southwestern Tennessee, had begun an
intense and protracted struggle that was as much about economics as it
was about segregation and citizenship. This conflict between black
sharecroppers and white landowners was precipitated by black people
asserting their right to participate in elections. The response of whites to
this political initiative revealed the extent to which land ownership and
economic prowess determined the racial hierarchy of the South. White
landlords evicted dozens of sharecropping families from the land they
had worked and lived on for years because they dared to go down to the
county courthouse and attempt to register to vote. Unbowed despite their
tactical defeat, the landless farm families had refused to leave the
community, opting to stay while they petitioned the federal government
for redress. In an unprecedented act of collective resistance, they built
makeshift homes on a 200-acre plot of land donated for their use by a
sympathetic black landowning farmer, Shepard Towles. The
encampment was dubbed “Freedom Tent City.”3
The struggle in Fayette County received wide coverage in the African
American press. The NAACP, CORE, and other civil rights and social
justice groups, along with several labor unions, raised funds and
collected donations of food and clothing to sustain and support the
Tennessee activists. Before he joined SNCC, James Forman helped
establish the northern-based Fayette County Emergency Relief
Committee and spent many months going back and forth between
Chicago and Tennessee with supplies and advice. Forman saw the
struggle in Fayette County as a kind of “watershed” in the movement
because, in this instance, an indigenous leadership had emerged and was
connecting demands for full citizenship and civil rights to economic
issues. Forman became so immersed in the Fayette County struggle that
at one point he was accused of trying to take it over from the local
people. Whether or not this charge was justified, he took it seriously and
brought the lessons he had learned in Fayette County with him into
SNCC.4 Ella Baker shared this concern, and from the outset SNCC strove to
avoid even the perception of trying to dominate local struggles. SNCC
activists publicized the Fayette County struggle through the Student
Voice and conducted a food drive to provide material aid.5
Baker followed the Tennessee story closely, and in the early months
of 1961 she urged Ed King, who was then the executive secretary of
SNCC, to travel to Tennessee to explore ways in which the young people
could lend greater support. The newly formed organization provided
both material and moral support to the Fayette County “freedom
fighters.” For SNCC staff person Jane Stembridge, the struggle graphically
illustrated “the connection between poverty and civil rights.”6 In addition
to collecting food and clothing, SNCC'S leadership cosigned a statement
directed at the federal government demanding intervention and relief aid
for the embattled former sharecroppers. The significance of this struggle
and the heroism of the local people became the topic of many informal
discussions around the SNCC office from the fall of 1960 through the
summer of 1961.7 John Lewis recalled that the example of Fayette
County was a sobering one for many young SNCC organizers and gave
them a glimpse of what lay ahead.8
The Student Voice,SNCC'S newsletter, highlighted the courage and
suffering of Fayette County activists and cast them as pivotal forces in
the struggle for freedom in the South. The SNCC newsletter covered the
issue quite differently from the Crisis, the NAACP's journal. Perhaps
encouraged by Baker's editorial guidance, the Student Voice emphasized
the leadership, courage, and oppression of the evicted sharecroppers.
Although the Crisis also described the desperate conditions of the tent
dwellers, it stressed the fact that respectable, middle-class blacks as well
as semiliterate sharecroppers had been denied the ballot in Fayette and
Haywood Counties. In praising the Justice Department for filing suit in
November 1959 against nineteen white Democratic Party officials for
excluding blacks from the local primary, Gloster Current, the NAACP's
director of branches, pointed out that among those who were denied the
right to vote were a “well-to-do grocer,” a teacher, and a minister.
Current described another would-be voter as a “high school teacher,
educated at Iowa State University, and possessor of a master's degree.”9
These four individuals, however, were certainly not representative of the
100 illiterate and semiliterate tenant farmers who were at the center of
the struggle in Tennessee.10
Ella Baker visited Fayette County in January 1961, met with residents
of the tent city, and wrote her own story about the conditions there for
the Southern Patriot, the newsletter of the Southern Conference
Education Fund (SCEF). Baker's report, like the coverage in SNCC'S
newsletter, differed sharply in tone and emphasis from how the NAACP
portrayed the situation. Baker conveyed vividly to her readers the depth
of southern black poverty and the harshness of white reprisals against
activists. The sharecroppers she visited lived in “olive-drab tents without
floors, surrounded by inches of mud and mire: the darkness within these
tents that are lighted by kerosene lamps and heated by wood stoves; the
not-too-well-clad children crowded into the tents or squashing around in
the mud; and the hungry shivering dogs wandering about; all of this
painted a picture of anything but hope for the new year.”11
While the Crisis applauded the small steps taken by the U.S. Justice
Department, Baker's article in the Southern Patriot expressed outrage at
how little government intervention there had been. Indicting any notion
of American progress that would leave destitute black farmers behind,
Baker wrote that “the real tragedy is that in the wealthiest country in the
world, in the jet-propelled atomic age of 1961, human beings could
honestly say that their mud-floored tents were more comfortable than the
shacks they formerly called ‘home’ for five, ten or 30 years.” The
material hardships that activists suffered in Freedom Tent City were
similar to those they had endured during their entire lives as
sharecroppers; and once they had undertaken this act of resistance, their
outlook and morale had actually improved. Baker was optimistic that the
resolve of the oppressed themselves, rather than the benevolence of the
government, meant “a new dawn of freedom [was] breaking through the
age-old social, economic and political discrimination that blighted the
lives of both whites and Negroes in the South.”12
The Tennessee activists founded their own independent group, the
Fayette County Civic and Welfare League, which was led by John
McFerren, a store owner who had become a militant. The McFerrens had
a home of their own, so they did not live in the tent city; but they
strongly sympathized with the evicted families because they had
previously been tenant farmers themselves. The White Citizens Council
orchestrated a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the
league. White merchants refused to sell medicine, food, or supplies to
tent city residents, and McFerren and his wife, Viola, were subjected to
constant surveillance and harassment, including many threatening phone
calls.13 Moreover, John McFerren was deliberately run over by a truck
and nearly killed. Despite these reprisals, neither the McFerrens nor the
members of the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League gave up their
crusade to document and protest political and economic discrimination
against blacks in the county.
Baker had known some of the Fayette County activists before their
struggle hit the national press. On the eve of the Greensboro sit-ins in
January 1960, she and Carl Braden had brought John McFerren to
Washington, D.C., to testify at the civil rights hearings cosponsored by
SCEF and SCLC. His emotional testimony was one of the most compelling
moments of the hearings. As she did with many of the local activists
whom she met during her years of organizing, Baker adopted the
McFerrens into her political family and kept in touch with them long
after the struggle in Fayette County had subsided.14
Baker introduced young SNCC activists to the McFerrens so that they
could learn from the example, experiences, and perspectives of poor
black people.15 The struggle in Fayette and Haywood Counties was in
crucial respects a model of indigenous black defiance and self-defense.
The Tennessee tenant farmers were the victims of enormously
exploitative and repressive conditions. Once moved to act, however, they
were not afraid to stand up for themselves with unrelenting courage and
defend themselves forcefully if necessary. When shots rang out one night
from a passing carload of white men, a group of armed black men
immediately mobilized to defend the tent encampment. Early B.
Williams, who had been shot, was transported to a nearby hospital under
armed escort.16 For Ella Baker, this situation underscored not only the
terribly oppressive conditions under which so many rural black people
suffered but also, perhaps more importantly, the depth of the
determination that resided in such communities. Poor black southerners
were not downtrodden victims; they were eager to fight to improve their
lot.
Baker was rarely surprised by an upsurge of protest in places like
Fayette County because, as a keen observer of southern black culture,
she could detect rumblings beneath the surface of seemingly calm
situations. As she talked with people like Papa Tight in Shreveport and
the sharecroppers in Tennessee, they sometimes spoke about things only
tangentially related to politics, but she was collecting valuable
information all the same. In such seemingly casual conversations, she
listened for what historian Earl Lewis calls the “semi-public transcript”
of opposition within oppressed communities. Building on the work of
political scientist James Scott, historian Robin Kelley, and others, Lewis
suggests that what people laugh at, the songs they create and listen to,
and the slang they use are all subtle indicators of a nascent political
consciousness. A careful, reflective listener can ascertain what those
people, if organized, might be prepared to do politically.17 Ella Baker
wanted the young activists in SNCC to hear the stories of Tennessee
sharecroppers, to look to them as sources of inspiration, and to extract
lessons about the potential, and the dangers, as they could be applied to
similar struggles in the future.18
DEVELOPING A PHILOSOPHY FROM
PRACTICE
Between 1960 and 1962, as the historian Clayborne Carson's
organizational biography of the group demonstrates, SNCC underwent a
dramatic evolution in its politics, culture, and personnel. Many of the
students who had attended the Shaw meeting dropped out to pursue other
interests or to return to their studies. Those who remained with the
organization were augmented by a new cadre of activists who were more
determined and more politically savvy than their predecessors. One of
them was James Forman. A thirty-three-year-old former teacher from
Chicago, Forman joined SNCC'S staff in 1961 after he had gained a
reputation for his organizing skills in Fayette County. Years later, he
recalled that he was told by Charles Jones that he had to meet with Ella
Baker's approval before SNCC would make a final decision to hire him.
Of course, this practice was entirely unofficial; Baker did not believe that
any leader should exercise veto power. But because SNCC staff held her in
such high esteem, her opinion was sought on virtually every important
decision. Forman made the obligatory pilgrimage to Baker's Harlem
apartment to discuss the job, the organization, and politics in general.
She sized him up and authorized the hire.19
With the skills and passions that Forman and other new recruits
brought with them and the help of Ella Baker's subtle, yet powerful
guidance, SNCC grew far beyond what its founders had envisioned.
Explicit references to religion gradually gave way to a more secular and
militant rhetoric, and nonviolence was increasingly viewed as a
necessary tactic rather than as a sacred philosophy. Most significantly,
the SNCC activists' involvement in struggles like the one in Fayette
County directly impacted their class politics, grounding them firmly with
black people who were rich in wisdom and courage but poor in terms of
economic assets.
When SNCC members went into small towns and cities throughout the
South, for example, they first paid their respects to the clergy and to
others who might cast themselves as the leaders and representatives of
the black community. But then the activists knocked on doors in the most
run-down parts of town and in the most remote and impoverished rural
areas. Gradually, those doors creaked open. The activists sat down with
individuals who had little formal education and asked them to analyze
the situation around them and help shape the agenda for change. This
was a major departure, both in substance and in style, from the practices
of national and regional groups like the NAACP, CORE, and SCLC, which
operated on the assumption that leadership came from an educated,
professional, or clerical class.20 Baker understood, however, that smalltown black communities were often polarized by class differences, even
as they were united by Jim Crow segregation. She had learned from
experience that using local elites as conduits to the masses could actually
backfire, lessening the credibility of outside organizers who were trying
to gain access to a particular community.
In pursuing a more egalitarian political practice, SNCC broke new
ground. According to the Mississippi historian John Dittmer, “Not since
Reconstruction had anyone seriously proposed that illiterate
sharecroppers had the same right to the franchise as did teachers, lawyers
and doctors.”21 This radical departure from the approach favored by
liberal civil rights groups was heavily influenced by Ella Baker's ideas
and organizing style. Through her own life, teaching, and example, she
connected the young activists to a tradition of black radicalism that
hearkened back to the early twentieth century and before.
In the early 1960s, SNCC organizers were not only challenging white
supremacy; they were contributing to the dismantling of the caste system
that existed within many black communities.22 At every opportunity,
Baker reiterated the radical idea that educated elites were not the natural
leaders of black people. Critically reflecting on her work with the NAACP,
she observed, “The leadership was all from the professional class,
basically. I think these are the factors that have kept it [the NAACP] from
moving to a more militant position.” She urged SNCC, as she had urged
SCLC and the NAACP, to seek out “indigenous leaders,” ordinary people
engaged in struggle, regardless of credentials or social class, and to
affirm their right to define the politics and direction of the movement.23
Local autonomy was the cornerstone of a meaningfully engaged
democratic practice. If local people did not have ownership of the
struggle they were engaged in, they would be beholden politically to
others who would not necessarily experience the consequences of that
struggle. Julian Bond observed that the goal of SNCC organizers in local
struggles was to help generate “a community movement with local
leadership, not a new branch of SNCC.”24 Jane Stembridge, who spent
time in the Greenwood office after working closely with Baker in
Atlanta, put it this way: “The field staff saw itself as playing a very
crucial but temporary role in this whole thing. Go into a community. As
soon as local leadership begins to emerge, get out of the community, so
that the leadership will take hold and people will not continue to turn to
you for guidance. You work yourself out of a job rather than trying to
maintain yourself in a position or your organization. It doesn't matter if
you go in and call yourself a SNCC worker or a core worker or just a
person who is there.”25
The real test of a democratic leadership was whether groups and
individuals could downplay their partisan and personal interests for the
greater good. Proprietary claims to or by an organization, or to any
position within it, were corrupting, Baker believed, arguing instead for
placing the ideals and politics of the movement above the interests of any
one organization, including SNCC itself. This approach stood in contrast
to that of the NAACP, which sought to exert tighter control over its
branches despite, and sometimes because of, aggressive local leadership
and resistance to centralized authority.
Baker recognized that an organizer's own personal interests and
desires might readily become conflated with the larger goals of the
group, and the group's partisan interests might get conflated with the
goals of a larger movement; so she took deliberate steps to prevent such
confusion. Her motto was “I was never working for an organization. I
always tried to work for a cause. And that cause was bigger than any
organization.”26 Having repeatedly built, let go, and rebuilt movement
groups, on some level, Baker considered the process healthy and
rejuvenating.
This philosophy accounts, in part, for Baker's rather nomadic political
existence and explains why she never stayed with any one organization
for very long. Although she maintained a home base in New York City
for most of her adult life, she was on the road more often than not. From
1957 on, she had a sparsely furnished apartment in Atlanta's all-black
Wallahuje residential hotel. Aside from the family photographs she
brought with her from New York, the apartment revealed little about the
tastes, preferences, or private life of its occupant. Her interests were
revealed primarily by the papers, magazines, books, reports, clippings,
and letters that accumulated in piles awaiting her attention. This was a
place to read, to catch up on what was happening in other places, and to
reflect on the struggle. Except for fixing her signature lamb stew
occasionally, she did not cook much, and her refrigerator and cupboards
were usually bare. She also paid little attention to other domestic tasks.27
Baker's mobility and her belief that organizational loyalties should
remain fluid made for a migratory political existence. Before she became
involved in SNCC, her political ties were tenuous at best. Because she
never stayed in any one organization for very long, she was never able to
influence how an organization like the NAACP or SCLC would evolve
politically or structurally, as she had once hoped to do. At the NAACP and
SCLC, she worked around the centers of power, organizing those who
remained on the margins. Yet her identity as a political vagabond helped
her because she was always perceived as an independent person without
vested interests in one faction or another. This earned her enormous
credibility with the young people of SNCC, as it had done with grassroots
activists. In the early 1960s, SNCC became the political home and family
that she had sought for so long. She was finally settling down—at least
temporarily.
SOUTHWEST GEORGIA: POLITICAL
DIFFERENCES AND PERSONAL
LOYALTIES
As SNCC became a more visible and formidable political force, the more
established civil rights groups viewed the upstarts as naive and cocky.
They resented SNCC for encroaching on what they regarded as their
political turf. These tensions came to a head in the small town of Albany,
Georgia (“all benny” as the locals called it), where competing strategies
and personalities made national headlines and revealed the growing
political rifts within the civil rights movement. The NAACP, SNCC, and
SCLC were all involved with local activists in Albany, and they eventually
came into conflict over issues of tactics, turf, and leadership. Although
Baker dissuaded SNCC from sectarian inclinations, the group had to fight
for its autonomy and visibility vis-à-vis other civil rights groups that
were throwing their weight around and, in Baker's view, attempting to
undermine SNCC'S efforts at grassroots organizing.
In November 1961, Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon were asked
by SNCC'S coordinating committee to go to Albany to help bolster the
local movement there. Sherrod, whom Baker had recruited as one of
SNCC'S first field secretaries, placed a high priority on building a strong
base with ordinary people in the community.28 So, the two SNCC activists
settled in, got to know community residents, and slowly gained the
confidence of a significant number of them, especially the young people.
As Cordell Reagon put it, he and Sherrod “acted like neighborhood
boys,” doing “work with the common people first.”29 This down-to-earth
approach became SNCC'S trademark. In describing the mode of organizing
that the young people in SNCC adopted, John Lewis recalled: “We were
meeting people on their terms, not ours. If they were out in the field
picking cotton, we would go out in that field and pick with them… .
Before we ever got around to saying what we had to say, we listened.
And in the process we built up both their trust in us and their confidence
in themselves.”30
The Albany Movement, the local umbrella organization, coordinated
street demonstrations to protest segregation, organized consumer
boycotts against racist businesses, launched a bus boycott, and initiated a
campaign to promote black voter registration. As in most other places in
the South, Albany's black electorate was virtually immobilized. The
NAACP, which had been organizing in the region for years, counseled its
local allies to document discrimination and prepare for litigation. The
NAACP's national leaders strongly objected to what they viewed as
provocative, illegal actions on the part of the “young Turks” in SNCC.
Roy Wilkins believed that SNCC had acted irresponsibly in Albany when
it pushed for an escalation of protests. Moreover, he resented the young
activists' ungrateful attitude. Wilkins felt the NAACP had supported the
neophytes, even helping to get some of them out of jail, “only to be
insulted for being on the wrong side of the generation gap.”31
When SCLC came to Albany, the situation became even more complex.
William Anderson, a doctor of osteopathic medicine and a local leader of
the Albany Movement, appealed to Martin Luther King to visit the town
in order to gain publicity for the struggle and pressure white officials to
act on the movement's demands. Many SNCC organizers strongly opposed
this move, as did some local activists. Although some early SNCC
supporters had tightened their ties to SCLC and some, like James Bevel,
had even joined the SCLC payroll, the core leadership of SNCC had grown
increasingly skeptical of SCLC's style of organizing and of Dr. King's
charismatic style of leadership. Some of the young activists had taken to
mockingly calling King “da lawd” behind his back.32
On his arrival in Albany in December 1961, King ignited controversy.
After being arrested in a protest demonstration, he allowed himself to be
bailed out of jail and gave a tacit nod to the city leaders' offer to
negotiate an end to the protests. Although recollections vary, there was
apparently a breakdown in communication between King and sectors of
the Albany Movement. He felt that he was adhering to the consensus of
the local leadership, but some local movement participants and SNCC
organizers disagreed.33 Baker saw King's highly publicized visits as
undermining local people's confidence and autonomy and lessening the
visibility of the Albany Movement's own spokespersons. When he came
to town, she complained, “you can imagine who the press looked to.”34
Several SNCC leaders were very vocal about their criticisms of King,
making comments to reporters that revealed schisms and tensions within
the movement that had not previously been made public.35
From the fall of 1961 through the summer of 1962, both Baker and
King shuttled in and out of Albany. However, Baker's low-key
interventions were in contrast to King's high-profile appearances.
Howard Zinn recalled that when he first arrived in Albany in December
1961, Baker was engaged in practical work:
Hundreds of people were coming out of jail. Many of them had
been fired by their white employers, and they gathered in the
Shiloh Baptist Church for help. Ella Baker sat in the corner of the
church, pen and paper in hand… . She was a middle-aged
handsome woman with the resonant voice of a stage actress, who
moved silently through the protest movements in the South, doing
the things the famous men did not have time to do. Now, hour after
hour, she sat there as people lined up before her, patiently taking
down names, addresses, occupations, immediate money needs.36
In addition to her role as an analyst and political strategist, Baker held
another job in the movement: attending to the mundane details necessary
to keep organizations and individuals going.
The confrontations in Albany were rooted in the political histories of
the organizations involved, but personal relationships were entangled in
the mesh as well. Vernon Jordan, then a savvy young lawyer, and Ruby
Hurley, the tough veteran organizer, were the two top NAACP staffers
dispatched from the national office in the fall of 1961 to take charge of
the situation in Albany. The NAACP naturally felt it had a proprietary
claim to defend, having been active in the area for years; Baker had even
spoken there under its auspices. So, the NAACP's national leadership was
flustered both by King's appearance and by SNCC'S militant activism.
Charles Sherrod and other SNCC activists experienced “very sharp
confrontations” with Hurley.37 But while Hurley was one of SNCC'S chief
adversaries in the Albany struggle, she was not just another NAACP
bureaucrat to Ella Baker: she was an old and dear friend.
The two women had significant bonds. Both had worked as field
secretaries in the NAACP during the 1940s, and on more than one
occasion they had been allies against the top leadership of the
organization. They had socialized together too, eating at one another's
homes and commiserating about their egotistical male “superiors” in the
New York office. Hurley remained part of Baker's extended political
family in New York City during the 1950s. In fact, Hurley had taken
Ella's niece Jackie shopping to buy her first pair of high-heel shoes, a rite
of passage Jackie remembered fondly some forty years later.38 In
Albany, however, Hurley and Baker found themselves on opposite sides
of a struggle within the movement. Yet their friendship, even then,
survived.
Ella Baker's ability to sustain long-term friendships with other
activists when particular political circumstances put them in adversarial
positions was one of her most important gifts. Her talent for making and
keeping connections, for recognizing in people more than their
ideological stance or organizational position, was an important, if
sometimes invisible, contribution to the movement. Although she strove
to be principled and consistent in her own politics, she allowed for
divergent opinions between herself and others, keeping in mind the need
for broader networks and coalitions. In turn, people who knew her
trusted and respected Ella Baker, even if they did not always agree with
her about strategy and tactics.
Baker and Hurley had taken divergent political paths some years
before. When Baker decided to break with the national office of the
NAACP over questions of democracy and leadership, Hurley opted to stay.
The political differences that were reflected in those choices were at the
heart of the internal movement struggles that were played out more than
a decade later in Albany. Baker had become even more convinced that
grassroots activists had to confront their oppression directly, by
challenging exploitative landowners, biased voter registrars, and official
and vigilante enforcers of segregation. Although she knew full well that
racial inequality was structural, to her it was not an abstract system to be
tackled indirectly. People themselves had to make a change by
challenging inequality concretely, as they encountered it in their daily
lives. From the perspective of Hurley and the NAACP leadership in New
York, on the other hand, a nationwide organization and a centralized,
well-coordinated strategy gave coherence and stability to local struggles.
In their view, it was ultimately the Congress and the Supreme Court, not
protests in the streets, that would determine the outcome of the struggle.
What Baker viewed as suffocating interference by outside national
leaders, Hurley saw as supportive, expert guidance.
As civil rights struggles sharpened after 1960, militant,
confrontational tactics became a key area of disagreement. The NAACP
had charted the legal route to political empowerment. This route was not
narrow or exclusive, but it had to be navigated very carefully to ensure
success. The NAACP did engage in protests, and at times its presence
elicited violent and repressive reactions from southern segregationists.
Hurley and her co-workers were certainly experienced and politically
sophisticated enough to understand this dynamic. Still, the law was the
national NAACP's weapon of choice against racism and discrimination,
and it had already secured some important victories. Ella Baker, on the
other hand, did not have much faith in lawyers, judges, or legislators. In
order to shift the political climate and effect real change, the masses had
to push against and even disrupt the status quo, and the pressure they
applied had to be steady and sustained, not sporadic. In Baker's view, if
people did not feel they had taken an active part in their own
emancipation, but believed that it had been won for them, then half the
battle had already been lost; ordinary people's sense of their own power
would be compromised.
The struggle in Albany wore on for nearly eighteen months. Although
more than 1,000 activists were arrested, SNCC'S participation yielded few
tangible concessions from the city government or local businesses. Some
observers deemed the Albany struggle a failure, but historians agree that
it was an important testing ground for SNCC. Clayborne Carson, Vincent
Harding, and Howard Zinn have argued convincingly that SNCC'S
involvement in the Albany Movement had long-term implications for the
organization: the young activists gained greater confidence in their
capacity to organize in the face of sustained repression. Carson
emphasizes that SNCC was “able to bring previously dormant elements of
the black populace into a sustained struggle for civil rights” through the
use of militant nonviolent tactics.39 Because of SNCC'S democratic
organizing practices, Albany's youth, its poor, and its working class came
to be active participants in the movement.
SCEF
Although Ella Baker devoted most of her political energy in the early
1960s to SNCC, she continued to maintain multiple affiliations, in keeping
with her view that one's chief loyalty should be to the movement and not
to any one organization. From 1961 to 1963, her income came
principally from her involvement in the special human relations project
sponsored by the southeastern regional YWCA, but she also had a very
close working relationship with her friends in SCEF, including the
Bradens, the Shuttlesworths, and black South Carolina radical Modjeska
Simkins.40 As soon as her tenure with SCLC ended in the fall of 1960,
Baker embarked on an association with SCEF that eventually led her to
join its small staff in the spring of 1963. As rifts developed between
various organizations within the movement, she sought to build bridges,
in particular between SCEF and SNCC. Each year, SCEF donated several
thousand dollars to support SNCC'S work, and Anne Braden attended most
of SNCC'S meetings during its first few years.
In a consulting capacity, Baker attended SCEF board meetings, spoke
at SCEF conferences, and documented anti-civil rights activity in the
Florida legislature as a part of a monitoring project there. In October
1961, Baker, the Bradens, and allies of theirs, including C. T. Vivien and
Myles Horton, formed Operation Freedom, something of a successor to
In Friendship, which funneled money to activists “suddenly in dire
straits.” Their first project was to aid the militant farmers in Fayette
County, Tennessee, and they later provided support to Mississippi
activists who were victims of economic retaliation by local whites.41
One of SCEF's political priorities during the early 1960s was to combat
the corrosive effect of anticommunism within the civil rights movement.
Toward that end, SCEF launched a concerted effort to link civil rights and
civil liberties, pointing out in its literature that the two issues were
inseparable; it organized workshops, conferences, and lectures
throughout the Southeast to bring attention to the issue. As Ella Baker's
respect and admiration for the Bradens strengthened, her ambivalence
about the role of suspected communists in the movement seemed to
weaken. She became one of the strongest voices within SNCC advocating
the principle of free association without any ideological litmus test, the
opposite of the NAACP policy she had defended in the 1950s.
In October 1961, Baker helped organize a SCEF-sponsored conference
on freedom and the First Amendment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Hoping to attract a more mainstream audience, she and Anne Braden
went to great lengths to put together a roster of well-respected presenters,
such as retired New York City judge Hubert Delany, whom Baker had
known in Harlem in the 1930s; Methodist bishop Edgar Love of
Baltimore; and SCLC's executive director, Baker's successor, Rev. Wyatt
T. Walker. Most of the speakers were ministers, professors, lawyers, or
judges; of the nineteen people listed on the program, only three—Baker,
Anne Braden, and Casey Hayden—were women.
A lot was riding on this conference for Anne Braden. The explicit
harassment and subtle slights that she and Carl had experienced were
taking their toll on her emotionally and psychologically, and she simply
needed some positive results. She did not mind fighting southern
segregationists, the real enemies of racial justice, but, as she would
confide to Ella Baker a year later, she was weary at having to “fight for
[her] right to fight” alongside supposed allies.42 The hope was that the
1961 conference would temper some of the anticommunist antagonism
within the movement and generate more support for SCEF and other leftwing forces.
The Bradens may have felt shunned by some in liberal circles, but
they had won many friends. Some people opposed red-baiting in the
southern movement largely out of personal loyalty to Carl and Anne,
whose determination, commitment, and courage were admired. They did
not operate like party functionaries, if they were indeed members of the
Communist Party. They were such staunch antiracist fighters that
allowing them to suffer government attacks was deemed by their allies to
be indefensible.43 In Ella Baker's case, friendship may have been the
factor that led her to shed her own ambivalent anticommunism, but she
quickly developed a more sophisticated and deeply reflective position on
civil liberties that extended well beyond her personal relationship with
the Bradens.
Around the time of the Chapel Hill conference, Anne and Ella
discussed the fact that framing the red-baiting issue in terms of personal
friendships and individuals had severe limitations. Anne felt that both
Wyatt T. Walker and Fred Shuttlesworth had overemphasized their
support of the Bradens as a gesture of personal loyalty rather than as a
matter of political principle. She complained, for example, that
Shuttlesworth had given a speech in Louisville in which he praised her
generously but failed to even mention HUAC's harassment or the issue of
civil liberties. Anne explained to Jim Dombrowski that she and Ella had
agreed on the need for more internal education and candid private
conversations in order to politicize the issue in people's thinking.44
Ella Baker and Anne Braden devised a list of people that they thought
it important to engage in this process. Among the students they identified
were Diane Nash, Bob Moses, Charles Jones, Henry Thomas, and Dion
Diamond. Anne commented that Jones had previously testified
voluntarily before HUAC but seemed apologetic about it later. Ella had
suggested him because she thought he was someone who “responds to
his environment and in a civil liberties gathering would be better” than in
other settings.45 Anne also suggested to Baker that she invite her friends
John and Viola McFerren from Fayette County to attend.46
The daylong conference was held on October 27, 1961, at the
Educational Building of the Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill. As
chairperson of the afternoon session, Baker had the difficult task of
facilitating an intense, unwieldy, and sometimes fractious discussion
involving some fifty people. In her opening remarks, she speculated that
“the reason I was asked to preside at this session is because I have had a
great deal of experience in being pummeled from both sides [presumably
the right and the left] and so I am here to try to keep the session
going.”47 She guided and contained the debate with finesse and humor.
The audience included some of the most active and engaged intellectuals
and organizers on the left, such as Tom Hayden from the Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) and the socialist leader Michael Harrington,
and all of them had something to say. Sympathizing with an especially
long-winded questioner, but still trying to get him to wrap up his
comments, Baker asked him to get to the point, confessing that she was
also restraining herself from speaking: “You don't know how I am
burning to talk because I love it.”48
Another person expressed an unpopular opinion about HUAC, eliciting
boos and calls of “liar” from the audience before he stormed out of the
conference in frustration. After that incident, Baker had to wrestle back
control of the floor, chastise the audience, apologize to the speaker for
the heckling, and invite him to come back into the room and restate his
minority opinion, assuring him he would have the right to do so as long
as she was chairing the meeting. Freedom of speech was not only about
protesting the government's suppression of dissent but also about
insisting that the left not engage in suppression within its own ranks.49 In
terms of the goal of garnering a coalition of forces to challenge political
repression and link it to civil rights, this did not occur. What the
conference scenes illustrate, however, is how an individual like Ella
Baker navigated the ideological minefield that surrounded the
burgeoning black freedom struggle where she had located her efforts.
Throughout the early 1960s, Ella Baker worked with SCEF to highlight
the principles of civil liberties and freedom of association within the
movement and within SNCC in particular. In March 1962, she wrote an
article for the Southern Patriot titled “Lack of Thought Cripples the
South” in which she noted: “Today freedom of speech, association, the
right to protest for redress of grievances, and freedom from excessive
bails and inhumane punishment are daily being denied in the South
under the guise of defending the country against communism, and we
should no longer be hoodwinked by that.”50 She put the point more
directly in an article in Liberty Magazine a few years later: “Man can
only be free if he is free to question the postulates of a society. It is the
perversion of this position that has given birth to the McCaran Act,
HUAC, McCarthyism and the little HUACs of such states as Louisiana,
Alabama, and Mississippi.”51 In advance of a workshop on civil liberties
in the spring of 1963, and later that year as a follow-up, Baker traveled to
communities throughout the South and West to speak at small
community gatherings about the need to defend civil liberties as an
extension of the goals of the civil rights movement.52
In June 1963, some seventy-five people gathered in Atlanta for a
three-day workshop titled “How Free Are the ‘Free’?” Anne Braden and
Ella Baker were again the principal organizers, and once again they were
faced with the question of whom to invite. Unlike at the conference in
Chapel Hill, no formal presentations were scheduled. The workshop was
meant to be an opportunity for key people in the movement to speak
candidly about the issue of civil liberties and challenge one another on
areas of disagreement. Six months before the event, Anne expressed her
frustration with SCLC, feeling that she had to nag them to get their
support for anything related to civil liberties, including Carl Braden's
clemency petition, which both Wyatt T. Walker and Martin Luther King
did endorse. “I am tired” Anne confessed. “I have pursued them [people
at SCLC] for almost two years on this civil liberties question (and longer
in a sense), and to put it bluntly I have had it.”53 But she had become
more optimistic and even argued with Ella about the strategic importance
of inviting Walker to be involved in the June workshop. Baker
reluctantly conceded after Anne pleaded Walker's case, pointing out that
while he was not perfect, she felt he had spoken out more than others had
and was worth cultivating as an ally.54
The three-day discussion was lively, with Ella Baker and Bob Moses
finding themselves sometimes slightly at odds. Moses expressed his
concerns frankly. He did not have a gripe with communists; but he was
trying to be practical. Fearing the loss of much needed foundation
money, he suggested that funders would “pull the rug out from under us
if we don't face up to this situation.” Baker responded with a warning:
“I'm very much afraid of this ‘Foundation complex.’ We're getting praise
from places that worry me.”55 According to Moses, the police were using
the charge of communism to attack and undermine the movement; such
attacks, he felt, were causing real hardship and undermining the
movement's work. Anne Braden challenged Moses to consider whether
alleged communists were in fact the cause of the attacks, indicating that
she would leave the South immediately if she thought it would further
the goal of black freedom. When someone added that organizations like
SNCC should look at the person and not the ideology, Moses rejected this
as an oversimplification of a complex question. “We don't necessarily
accept people just because they are helpful,” he argued.56 Moses noted
that he had invited Carl Braden to speak on civil liberties in Mississippi
the previous summer and had gotten raked over the coals in the local
press. “We were tied up in Mississippi” as a result, he concluded.57 This
made him leery. Still, the majority of those in attendance seemed less
uncomfortable about communist affiliations, and many spoke of the need
to challenge HUAC more forcibly.
At its December 1963 retreat, SNCC took up the issue of civil liberties
yet again. The official position was not to exclude anyone based on
organizational affiliation but also not to pick a fight with HUAC by
launching a campaign against it. For her part, Ella Baker was not willing
to let HUAC off the hook so easily. She continued to raise concerns about
civil liberties in her speeches and writings and at SNCC meetings.58 The
issue would haunt SNCC for years to come.
In the meantime, Baker had formally joined the SCEF staff. Jim
Dombrowski, SCEF's executive director, was a Christian socialist and an
early supporter of the Highlander Folk School; he had been trying since
1961 to bring Ella Baker on board. Because of his confidence in her
good judgment, political instincts, and reputation, he conveyed to Anne
Braden his willingness to support unequivocally just about any project
that Baker proposed.59 Once she was on the SCEF staff, she enjoyed more
freedom and flexibility than she had ever previously experienced within
an organization. Dombrowski offered her a paycheck along with the
autonomy to choose and define her work. During the years that followed,
Baker was essentially a free-floating movement consultant, adviser,
teacher, and resource person. Not surprisingly, one of her first projects
after she joined SCEF's staff was to go on a three-week organizing tour
with SCEF field secretary John Salter, a white former Tougaloo College
professor, to rally movement support in several western and midwestern
states. The pair traveled to Iowa, Nebraska, and Arizona, meeting with
church and civic groups and cosponsoring events with local core and
NAACP people in Des Moines.60
GENDER POLITICS AND GRASSROOTS
ORGANIZING
Bernice Johnson Reagon, who became politicized by the Albany
struggle, has pointed out that, although gender politics were not
explicitly articulated in the southern-based Black Freedom Movement of
the early 1960s, gender was nonetheless deeply implicated in the daily
lives and interactions of movement participants. As the young freedom
fighters in SNCC set out to dismantle white supremacy in the South, they
began, sometimes inadvertently, to challenge and transgress conventional
notions of gender. Rather than replicating the patterns of male
dominance and female deference that characterized middle-class culture,
traditional politics, and certain aspects of working-class culture, the
movement created alternatives to them. In Albany and elsewhere, young
women who defied segregation inevitably defied the norms that defined
middle-class femininity. By being bold, brave, and independent, they
stepped out of their “place.” The organizational ethos of SNCC also
provided a space for older women, who had long worked as rank-and-file
troops at the grassroots in local community struggles, to act as leaders
and serve as role models for younger people. The emergence of women
as indigenous leaders transformed gender relations within the movement.
For example, many movement participants recalled seeing more women
in the pulpit of the otherwise male-dominated black church during the
1960s than at any time before or after.
In places like Albany, Georgia, and Fayette County, Tennessee,
women engaged in acts of protest and suffered arrests and beatings
alongside the men. In a sense, this was neither new nor unusual. During
the 1940s and 1950s, in places like Birmingham and Shreveport, women
had led NAACP branches and local desegregation organizations and had
consequently become targets of harassment and violence. In the eyes of
many participants and observers, the acts of retribution were regrettable
instances of white barbarity, but the role of female militancy remained
obscured. What was new about SNCC was its embrace of women as key
participants in mass protests and as leaders at the center of the struggle.
Because of its deepening irreverence for conventional standards of
authority and respectability, SNCC bestowed credibility and honor on
women and girls who protested and fought back in the most unladylike
fashion. Young Ola Mae Quarterman drew attention to the Albany bus
boycott by confronting a driver who attempted to force her into Jim
Crow seating. “I paid my damn twenty cents and I can sit where I want,”
she proclaimed loudly before being arrested and carted off to jail.61
Sixteen-year-old Shirley Gaines was arrested and beaten by the police
after a protest to desegregate a bowling alley. Glenda Fleming, a
rebellious junior high school student, participated in demonstrations in
open defiance of her parents' wishes. College students like Bertha Gober
and Bernice Johnson risked expulsion from Albany State—and placed
their coveted degrees in jeopardy—by continuing their involvement in
the protests. Bernice later left school voluntarily in order work in the
movement full time.62 Ella Baker, who summoned Bernice to her
apartment to discuss her decision, gave her blessing once she was
convinced the young woman had thought through the options carefully.63
Ignoring the prevailing gender norms, these young women were warmly
applauded by SNCC as exemplary militants. Quarterman's language and
Gaines's recalcitrance contrasted sharply with the genteel, ladylike
demeanor that Rosa Parks exhibited, which had made her an ideal
candidate to personify respectable black resistance to segregation in
Montgomery in 1955.
Women were also prominent in the struggle in McComb, Mississippi,
where SNCC participated in an ongoing desegregation campaign and
initiated a voter registration project. Brenda Travis, a tough and
tenacious teenager, typified the kind of young women SNCC attracted
there. The Travises were not one of town's upstanding families. Brenda's
parents were poor and often out of work. In her class origins and defiant
demeanor, Brenda resembled Claudette Colvin, the young girl whom the
leaders of Montgomery's desegregation movement had deemed
unsuitable to represent them in 1955. Colvin, pregnant, poor, and
unmarried, had been thrown off a Montgomery bus weeks before Rosa
Parks took her now-famous stand, but because Colvin did not fit the
image of a respectable, middle-class citizen—because she was not a
“lady”—her case was passed over by those who were looking for an
opportunity to test the segregation laws and launch a public campaign. In
McComb, SNCC welcomed Brenda Travis, even though, or perhaps
because, she was labeled a rabble-rouser. She was only fifteen years old,
but she was so determined to join the movement that she lied to Bob
Moses about her age in order to be accepted as a volunteer.64
In August 1961, Brenda Travis and other students from Burgland
High School sat in at a Greyhound bus terminal in Pike County,
Mississippi. This bold action netted the leaders jail sentences, even
though they were minors.65 After two months in detention, Travis was
released on probation, but she was arrested again shortly thereafter for
participating in yet another protest. This time, Travis was sent to the
Colored Girls Industrial School, a reform school for delinquents in
Oaklie, Mississippi. When she was released from custody several months
later, her future was uncertain. She was headstrong and stubborn, and her
family had problems. Ella Baker quietly intervened and agreed to
become Brenda Travis's legal guardian. For several years, Baker
arranged for Brenda's care and education.66
As her political children entered into more and more dangerous
situations, facing formidable enemies at great personal sacrifice, Ella
Baker struggled to minimize the casualties of activism. She did not urge
vulnerable people to take such risks and then abandon them to the tender
mercies of white society. Brenda Travis might have become one of the
movement's casualties had Baker not been willing to help out by
“accepting a responsibility that [she] had not looked for but consequently
[could] not refuse to accept.”67 It was a difficult and frustrating
undertaking, and for a time the situation with Brenda put Baker in a state
of “constant turmoil.” Nevertheless, she saw to it that Brenda had
schooling, went to summer camp, and could stay with her in New York
for a while. Eventually, Brenda Travis was reunited with her family.
Years later, she reflected that her relationship with Baker “changed the
direction of my life.”68
Baker's personal politics and radical humanist philosophy meant that
she stayed in touch with local people after the smoke of battle had
cleared. She made sure that parents were contacted when their children
were arrested, that people going to jail had toothbrushes and hair combs,
that those who were expelled from school for their activism found other
institutions to accept them and obtained scholarships to support them.
She always tried to minimize the emotional and physical hardships
experienced by young people like Brenda Travis.
Baker paid particular attention to nurturing the development of young
women, whether they had joined local campaigns or had volunteered as
field organizers.69 Ruby Doris Smith, who became one of the more vocal
and active members of SNCC in 1961, benefited from Ella Baker's
guidance and support.70 A Georgia native and student at Spelman
College, Smith joined the Atlanta Committee of Appeal for Human
Rights, a SNCC affiliate, in the fall of 1960 as the group picketed
segregated businesses in downtown Atlanta. Her initial foray into politics
was modest, and so was her manner; but as she read books about social
justice and met more young people involved in the growing movement,
her interest and commitment deepened. Along with other SNCC activists,
Smith went to Rock Hill, South Carolina, in February 1961 as an act of
solidarity with local sit-in leaders who had been jailed and were refusing
bail as a matter of principle. This was a bold act for Ruby Doris Smith,
but SNCC'S Judy Richardson has noted that “it later became a badge of
courage.”71
Smith's brief jail stint in South Carolina was nothing compared to
what she and other activists endured a few months later. In May 1961,
Smith spent two hellish months in Mississippi's notorious Parchman
Prison for her participation in the Freedom Rides. These experiences
made Smith more mature politically, more militant tactically, and more
determined than ever. Like Ella Baker, she was more inclined toward
self-defense than nonviolence. A serious organizer who never hesitated
to speak her mind, she became by the fall of 1961 a formidable force
within SNCC. According to Cynthia Griggs Fleming, her biographer,
Smith had a reputation within the movement as “a savvy veteran … who
was incredibly brave, as well as politically sophisticated.”72 Five years
later, she succeeded Jim Forman as SNCC'S executive secretary, becoming
the first woman to hold that powerful position.73
The relationship between Ruby Doris Smith and Ella Baker was
marked by genuine affection and mutual respect. When Smith was in the
Hinds County jail in 1961, Baker wrote her a letter to boost her spirits
and remind her of the value of her sacrifice: “I hope your present
experience has not been too trying for you.” Baker spoke of her
“continued pride in the courage you have manifested on more than one
occasion” and expressed “the hope that your health will not suffer as a
result of your stay in Jackson.”74 In seeking to strengthen the resolve and
confidence of Smith and other young women, Baker wanted them to rise
toward leadership roles in the larger movement.
The transformative process of involvement in a democratically
constituted social change movement represented a personal rite of
passage for Ruby Doris Smith and the other young activists engaged in
the struggle. Men and women found that, as the meanings of “whiteness”
and “blackness” began to change, so too did the meanings of
womanhood and manhood. Men were moved to rethink masculinity,
questioning the place to which white society had relegated adult black
men and, at times, even questioning black men's aspirations to fulfill
white norms of manhood. When Charles McLaurin talked about the day
he accompanied to the courthouse door three elderly women who were
attempting to register to vote in Ruleville, Mississippi, he said that this
was “the day I became a man.” It was not the day he was jailed or
pummeled or delivered his first speech to a large audience or “led”
someone from one place to another; it was the day he became the kind of
humble warrior whom Baker so often praised. McLaurin's political and
personal coming of age was signified by his supporting the political
empowerment of a group of poor black women.
Many teenagers became men and women in the dangerous and
dynamic context of the evolving civil rights movement. They fell in love,
had their first sexual experiences, and defied their parents or allied with
them on issues that were more important than doing chores or smoking
cigarettes. They experienced local government officials' wrath and
vigilantes' violence as adults, not as children. They made life or death
choices every day that had consequences not only for themselves but
also for people whose trust and confidence they had earned. It was a
coming of age like no other. They matured intellectually and emotionally
in the Freedom Houses and Freedom Schools that SNCC established in
dusty southern towns. In these rural communities, SNCC volunteers taught
and learned from black folk who were old enough to be their parents or
grandparents. In the process, they forged new identities at the same time
that they forged new political ideas and strategies.
As the SNCC activists were tried and tested by the violence that so
often met black people's open resistance to white supremacy, it is no
wonder that young men in the movement were tempted to reach for the
conventional mantle of manhood and act as protectors of “their” women
or as the generals and soldiers in a war of liberation. Many of these
young men had been socialized into the dominant society's attitudes
about gender and behaved in sexist, even macho ways. What is
surprising is not the degree of conformity to social norms but rather the
extent to which many young men in SNCC began to rethink and reject
conventional notions of gender in the process of reconsidering the
meanings of race and class and redefining their own identities. For
example, reflecting years later on his maturation in the movement,
Charles McDew recalled that he embraced his male comrades and told
them that he loved them in a way he could not have conceived of doing
before he entered the movement. It was not a conscious decision to
transgress gender roles; instead, it came somewhat organically out of the
situation he found himself in. The ethos of heroism combined with
humility bred such displays of warmth and affection. It was a different
time, and McDew was consciously becoming a different kind of man.75
Lawrence Guyot, a tough, husky Louisianan who attended Tougaloo
College and then worked with SNCC in Mississippi, was humbled by his
exposure to women like Ella Baker and Pauli Murray, to whom Baker
introduced him. He once made what he later admitted was a sexist
comment in Baker's presence, and she calmly corrected him with a brief
history lesson about women's role in the struggle. “I made one of the
most idiotic statements I ever made,” he confessed, “and I have never
said anything like that since.” In his opinion, there was “no one more
compassionate or tougher” than Ella Baker; her example inspired him to
see differently not only women's role in the movement but his own role
as a man as well.76
Ivanhoe Donaldson, a New Yorker who attended Michigan State
University, was described as a “shrewd and savvy hand at civil rights
work” and a “polished pool player.”77 He understood his own
transformation in the context of the patriarchal training he and most
others had received before coming into the movement. “We came from
homes where dinner didn't start until [the father] sat down, and he
determined the rules of the house. But then in SNCC you are thrown in
with women who are smarter and more talented … [and you come to
realize] that manhood isn't the ability to knock someone down but
finding your own humanity.”78
What made these alternative practices and philosophies of gender
possible within SNCC? In the early 1960s, it was clearly not any explicitly
proclaimed feminist principles on the part of the organization. Probably a
combination of factors was involved, but Baker's example and influence
were crucially important. She was a striking exception to the
predominant images that defined black womanhood; her style and
demeanor encompassed socially ascribed masculine and feminine
qualities—nurturing warmth coupled with a ruggedly unshakable
confidence. That made her an inspiration to those who wished to step
outside the boundaries of conventional, middle-class gender norms. It is
tempting to attribute these norms to the “middle class” because they
were certainly embraced more enthusiastically by that sector of the black
community. However, through school and church institutions, workingclass blacks also adhered to certain patriarchal family practices and
restricted gender roles, even when the realities of their everyday lives
prevented black women from conforming to the idealized model of
homemaker and helpmate. Yet in regard to gender, as in SNCC'S
alternative approach to class, Baker's indirect influence was even more
powerful than her direct presence. In SNCC'S grassroots campaigns, young
activists met and learned from poor and working-class women who had
developed a striking independence of thought and action through years
of hard work and repeated confrontations with whites in day-to-day
resistance to Jim Crow. As SNCC activists followed these women's
examples, they learned other ways of being men and women.
Although women had always been central to community-based
campaigns for civil rights, they seldom were accorded recognized
leadership roles, and their contributions were often unknown outside the
locality and often forgotten after the struggle was over. In the
Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 and the school desegregation
battles in Little Rock and elsewhere, for example, Joanne Gibson
Robinson and Daisy Bates played central leadership roles, but in the
organizations with which they were affiliated, the Montgomery
Improvement Association and the national NAACP, men were the
principal spokespersons and decision makers. The MIA and the NAACP
were hierarchical in their structures, with the result that gender and class
inequities were perpetuated by the overwhelmingly male leadership. The
strategy of racial uplift in the early and mid-twentieth century was rooted
in the notion that the educated elite would skillfully guide the race
toward progress, on the one hand lobbying and litigating for reforms and
on the other grooming and socializing the “lower-class” elements to
prepare themselves for integration. Restrictive norms of masculinity and
femininity were part and parcel of the mainstream, middle-class
approach to social change and to leadership roles.79
The SNCC activists always had to struggle against the tendencies
toward elitism and male domination, but SNCC did enable women,
workers, farmers, and youth to emerge as strong, effective, and publicly
recognized leaders of the movement. This achievement was in no small
measure the result of an active assertion of leadership on the part of SNCC
women themselves. As SNCC developed a bold and brazen public image,
bold and brazen women were attracted to it; and once they joined, no one
sought to constrain them. Ella Baker nudged them along this path and
cleared obstacles from their way whenever she could. As architect of
SNCC'S democratic approach, she in effect widened the space of
leadership, so that those most marginalized or excluded from the centers
of power in society and in civil rights politics could stand up and be
heard. Her fundamental commitment to a democratic vision and
inclusive political practice was not based on a feminist perspective per
se, but unconsciously, Baker had laid a foundation for subsequent black
and white radical feminist work.
10 MISSISSIPPI GODDAMN
FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
OF SOUTHERN RACISM
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And
everybody knows about Mississippi Goddamn.
Nina Simone, 1963
During the tumultuous and decisive years of the early 1960s, SNCC
played a leading role in the Black Freedom Movement in Mississippi.
Young field organizers put the principles that Ella Baker had taught them
into practice by working alongside poor and working-class black people
in rural communities where white supremacy had seemed impossible to
challenge. As a result, the organizers found themselves at the center of a
mass uprising that overturned old stereotypes of downtrodden, passive,
and terrorized black folk. Americans outside the South, both white and
black, became aware of Mississippi Freedom Summer, the grassroots
voting rights campaign conducted in 1964, only after the revelation that
three young workers had been ambushed and brutally murdered by
segregationists. By risking their lives for justice in the face of vigilante
violence, SNCC'S organizers experienced profound change in their lives,
but they were sustained by the example of many black people in
Mississippi for whom facing such risks had long been the price of
defending their dignity. In Freedom Schools that were founded on the
radically democratic pedagogy that Baker espoused and exemplified
within SNCC, organizers taught literacy skills and academic subjects to
young blacks and, in turn, learned about the underlying economic
structures of white supremacy from their students. Discovering the
enormous power of people acting together to confront injustice and
inequality, SNCC volunteers and staff felt reassured of the vision that had
drawn them to the organization.
One of the critical organizing principles that Ella Baker taught, and
SNCC absorbed, was the meaning of self-determination in the context of
grassroots organizing in the South. For Baker, this principle was not an
exclusively racial proposition, as it was often deployed, but simply the
democratic idea that an oppressed group, class, or community had the
right to determine the nature of the fight to end its oppression. Such self-
control of the movement's leadership by those it purported to represent
was essential in Baker's view. Most of SNCC'S Mississippi work in the
summer of 1964 was carried out under the auspices of a loose coalition
called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). So, through COFO
and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), SNCC worked to
advance the right of poor black Mississippians to determine their own
future.
The decision by SNCC to conduct a major grassroots voting rights
campaign in Mississippi in 1961-64 was audacious. From Baker's long
experience in the state and from the local activists with whom she had
put them in contact, SNCC activists knew that Mississippi's notorious
reputation was well earned. Some within the organization dubbed the
project the “Move on Mississippi,” as if an invasion of enemy territory
were being planned. Some of the most brazen and vicious southern
segregationists in the South were at the helm of state government there,
and Mississippi had a long history of unchecked, often officially
sponsored racial violence toward the black population. Many national
civil rights leaders had simply written off the state. As Andrew Young,
then an SCLC staff person, put it: “We knew the depths of the depravity of
southern racism. We knew better than to try to take on Mississippi.”1
Baker's perspective on Mississippi was precisely the opposite of
Young's. She felt that the movement had to organize within the belly of
the beast of southern racism rather than on its safer margins. This
viewpoint was an expression of her class politics as well. In her words,
“If you were supposed to be interested in bettering the lot of the have
nots, where … [would] be a better start [than] … in the rural areas …
[where] people had the hardest lives?”2 Baker taught SNCC activists to
look to the rural towns and plantations of Mississippi—“areas of greatest
direst need … where people had [the] least”—as their central organizing
challenge.3 This was not a challenge to be undertaken lightly or quickly.
The project that burst on the national stage in 1964 as Mississippi
Freedom Summer grew out of years of less publicized, but no less
arduous, work throughout the state.
Ella Baker's contacts with grassroots activists in Mississippi stretched
back for decades, and she kept in close touch with her friends and allies
there even when her work centered on other places. As SNCC sought to
extend its organizing efforts into rural and small-town communities
across the South, Baker turned to veteran activists in Mississippi to teach
a new crop of organizers about mobilizing the masses of people to
confront the power of southern elites.
AMZIE AND RUTH MOORE
Amzie and Ruth Moore were SNCC'S first real contacts in Mississippi in
1960, and Bob Moses returned to the South to reconnect with them in
1961. Ella Baker had known the Moores for years. In many ways, they
were exceptional people, but their story was not unlike that of many
other militant local activists scattered throughout the region who had
long fought racism and repression without much support from outside
the South. As Charles Payne put it, they “had been accumulating
political capital for a decade, in the form of contacts, networks,
knowledge of resources, and personal credibility, capital they were able
to transfer to the younger activists” whom Bob Moses and Ella Baker
would introduce them to.4 They were eager to receive the help that SNCC
was offering, especially with the understanding that local leadership
would remain in charge.
Amzie Moore had grown up dirt poor and left Mississippi for the first
time when he was drafted into the military during World War II. He had
joined the Black and Tan Party, a group of Negro Republicans active in
the South during the 1930s, and later he helped found the Regional
Council for Negro Leadership. After the war, Moore served as the head
of the Cleveland, Mississippi, chapter of the NAACP. As the owneroperator of a small gas station, he had a greater margin of economic
independence from whites than most black people in and around
Cleveland. But even independent black business people were hardly
immune to racist discrimination. During the 1950s, Amzie and his wife,
Ruth, suffered constant harassment and economic reprisals as a result of
their activism. Ruth Moore, a beautician whose small business also gave
her a certain independence, was as active, committed, and fearless as her
husband. Ella Baker and Ruth Moore maintained a close relationship,
even when Ruth's and Amzie's marriage fell apart during the early
1960s.5
Amzie Moore, like Ella Baker, had numerous run-ins with the
national office of the NAACP. He felt that the officers in Washington and
New York were sometimes insensitive to the perilous conditions faced
by organizers in the Deep South. An outspoken militant, Moore often
slept with a gun under his pillow.6 He was as intolerant of the snobbery
of local black elites as he was of the vitriolic racism of Mississippi
whites. In 1955, he complained: “The Negroes with money are in a
world of their own here in the State of Mississippi. They live to
themselves and they don't want things to change … they are not
interested in the freedom of the common Negro of Mississippi, but they
buy their fine cars, furs, homes and stay very much to themselves.”7
Despite their slight degree of economic independence, Ruth and Amzie
Moore never enjoyed much financial stability, and by the mid-1950s they
had been pushed to the verge of financial ruin. White-owned banks and
businesses, in a carefully concerted effort, threatened them with
foreclosure and bankruptcy. After Amzie Moore insisted that these
problems were the result of his NAACP activities, the national office had
offered some help, but the couple's financial situation remained
precarious. It was, in part, the desperate plight of organizers like the
Moores that had led Baker and her New York allies to form In Friendship
in 1956. Amzie and Ruth Moore were among of the first recipients of In
Friendship's aid.
Ella Baker made frequent visits to Mississippi during the 1950s and
1960s, often staying at the Moores' home in Cleveland. The bustling
household felt more like an office, meeting place, and movement hotel
than a private residence. In a letter to Ruth expressing gratitude for her
hospitality, Baker joked, “Thank you for the very lovely stay in your
home. It meant so much to me to be able to ‘rest’ for a few days. I say
rest advisedly because there is not too much difference between your
home and my office [as far as] the number of calls and requests for
information and assistance are concerned.”8 The Moores, like the
Shuttlesworths in Birmingham and the Simpkinses in Shreveport, were
the kind of fervent and unwavering fighters Baker was always drawn to.
She wanted the young people in SNCC to meet them and learn from their
example.
More than any other person in SNCC, Bob Moses benefited from
Amzie Moore's political tutelage. Baker knew that Moore, who had only
finished two years of high school, had much to teach the Harvard-trained
Moses about the politics and economics of racism in the Delta and how
to organize against it. Years later, Bob Moses acknowledged his debt:
“Amzie was my father in the movement … that was how I learned to
organize … I heard my way through the world. I listened to Amzie. I just
listened and listened. I watched him, how he moved.”9 Moses was
immediately convinced that the national movement had to support the
kind of work that Amzie and Ruth Moore had been doing in Mississippi.
The initial contacts between Moses and the Moores were the
organizational beginnings of the efforts that would peak in the summer
of 1964 with the national focus on the Mississippi movement, Freedom
Summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
When Bob Moses said, “We did for the people of Mississippi what
Ella Baker did for us,”10 he meant that SNCC field organizers and
volunteers tried to absorb the wisdom of indigenous leaders, to build
respectfully on the preexisting strength within the communities where
they organized, and to provide whatever was lacking—funds, time,
youthful energy, and certain skills. In other words, Moses followed the
example that Baker had set within SNCC. She never professed to having
created SNCC'S ideology; rather, she identified and nourished the radical
democratic tendencies apparent in the thinking of many of those who
were drawn to the organization.
When Bob Moses returned to Mississippi in the summer of 1961 to
lend his services to the fledgling movement there, Amzie Moore advised
him that conditions were not right for a campaign centered in Cleveland,
Mississippi. Moore felt that there was not enough local support there,
even though he was personally eager to work with SNCC, having been
impressed by what he saw and heard at the newly formed organization's
Atlanta conference the previous October. So Moses looked around for
another home base from which to launch the Mississippi organizing
drive. He settled on McComb, a small town in the hilly southwest corner
of the state, to be the headquarters for SNCC'S voter registration project.
An activist in the town had read about Moses's plans to register voters in
Mississippi in Jet Magazine; he contacted Amzie Moore, who suggested
that Moses look to McComb for a more promising start.11 Moses
enthusiastically agreed. This would be his first real attempt at organizing
and the first major community-based campaign for SNCC'S voting rights
initiative.
The McComb campaign proved to be a baptism by fire. Within a few
months of Moses's arrival, there were mass arrests, beatings, expulsions
from school, and at least one murder—that of Herbert Lee on September
25, 1961. Lee—an illiterate black dairy farmer, the father of nine
children, and a longtime member of the local NAACP—had driven Moses
around town to meet local people. According to movement observers, he
was singled out for retribution by local racists and was shot dead on a
public street by a local white man, allegedly over a personal dispute.12
After the controversy and violence of those first few months, the people
who had initially welcomed Moses with open arms began to pull away.
C. C. Bryant, the person who had invited Moses to McComb, was a
railroad worker, part-time barber, NAACP branch leader, local
bibliophile.13 But after arrests, beatings, and confrontational protests,
especially the unpopular arrest of some 100 high school students, Bryant
took a step back and distanced himself from the organization.14 Moses
and the volunteers who came to work with him in McComb nevertheless
persevered, even when support from their initial contacts began to wane.
What kept Moses in McComb was the support that SNCC received
from groups that had previously been on the margins of the town's black
society and had been largely ignored by its civil rights leaders. Perhaps
SNCC'S greatest accomplishment in McComb was its ability to recruit
local young people into its ranks. Brenda Travis, the intrepid teenager
whom Baker protected and guided, was a native of McComb and joined
the movement there. Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, two teenagers
from just outside McComb, also joined forces with SNCC as a result of
the 1961 campaign; they eventually became two of the movement's
strongest local organizers.15 Watkins had grown up on a farm in
southwest Mississippi, gone off to California after high school, and
returned south after witnessing the Freedom Rides on television.16 The
local teenagers participated in desegregation protests at the local
Woolworth's drugstore and the Greyhound bus station, leading to their
arrest. Brenda Travis was expelled from school for her participation in
the movement, an action that triggered a walk-out by sympathetic
classmates. Impressed by the boldness and courage that SNCC organizers
demonstrated, impatient youths were inspired to join the movement and
soon provided inspiration to others.
Another variable that sustained SNCC during its difficult early
campaigns was the unwavering moral and material support of Ella Baker.
While onetime supporters like C. C. Bryant criticized SNCC for
endangering children, Baker obtained financial resources from SCEF,
offered strategic advice and encouragement at meetings, and aided
individuals whose personal lives were thrown into turmoil because of
their involvement. She also reminded SNCC organizers to involve parents
and seek parental permission before working with minors in order to
minimize opposition. Time and again, Baker expressed her confidence in
SNCC'S leaders, encouraging them to go forward despite their inevitable
mistakes. Such reassurance from the voice of experience was essential to
young visionaries just entering the vicious fray of race politics.17
According to John Dittmer, one of the lessons SNCC learned from the
McComb campaign was that “the black middle class was under severe
economic constraints and could not be counted on to support the assault
against segregated institutions.”18 This observation points to a pivotal
factor in the campaign.19 Although SNCC was initially welcomed by the
local black middle class—the people with education, reputations, and
clout—as the struggle intensified that support quickly evaporated.20
Dittmer concludes that during the course of the McComb campaign SNCC
“intuitively grasped a vital part of its future mission in Mississippi:
developing a sense of worth and leadership among people who had never
been held in high regard in their communities.”21
The SNCC organizers shook hands with sharecroppers who had dirt
under their fingernails and sat at the feet of workers with dust on their
boots. They sat on the front porches of ramshackle tenant houses not
only to teach but also to learn. Their attitude, like Baker's, was based on
the understanding that expertise and wisdom could emanate from outside
a formally educated cadre of leaders. According to one SNCC activist,
Baker taught the young people in the movement who had achieved some
level of formal education that they were no smarter, and certainly no
better, than the uneducated farmers and workers in the communities
where they were organizing.22 Barbara Jones (Omolade), a black SNCC
worker from New York City, saw in Baker an example of how educated
black organizers should comport themselves. “There was no room for
talking down to anyone,” she recalled. “There was never the expressed
attitude that a person who was illiterate had something less to offer.”
Rather, Baker set a tone that said, “you've got your education, now sit
and learn … learn what the conditions are that people have around …
and it was hip to do that at that time.”23
As she had done in the past, Baker emphasized that when the
privileged took it upon themselves to speak for the underprivileged, the
whole movement was in danger of losing its direction. Referring to
whites with class and racial advantages and to blacks with “good
positions,” she argued that “those who are well-heeled don't want to get
un-well-heeled… . If they are acceptable to the Establishment and they're
wielding power which serves their interest, they can assume too readily
that that also serves the interest of everybody.”24 This perspective on
oppression and leadership crystallized during SNCC'S early years in
Mississippi and became a critical component of SNCC'S work from that
point on.
DRIVING DEEPER INTO THE DELTA
The McComb campaign led SNCC organizers to conclude that the struggle
had to be intensified if any meaningful change was going to occur. But
how that should be done was the subject of ongoing debate. Those who
joined Bob Moses in McComb—including Reggie Robinson, John
Hardy, Chuck McDew, Charles Sherrod, Ruby Doris Smith, Travis Britt,
and Marion Barry—had varying views on what route the Mississippi
movement should take. A lingering source of disagreement, which had
only been temporarily resolved at the Highlander Folk School meeting
on August 11, 1961, was the question of whether SNCC should focus on
direct action desegregation campaigns or on the voter registration drive
that Bob Moses had initially envisioned. Slowly surfacing was another
issue: what should be the future role of northern, mostly white,
volunteers? Some SNCC activists reasoned that rural Mississippi's
isolation was itself part of the problem of engendering significant
change; from their point of view, SNCC needed to draw the glare of media
attention to the conditions of disenfranchised blacks in places like
McComb and lean on their northern white liberal allies, who professed to
be great believers in black freedom, to take a firmer stand in defense of
civil rights. One possible scenario was to bring in more outside
supporters whose presence would attract such attention. But there was
not unanimity on this. Some SNCC staff felt that the initiative should
remain with the local people themselves. If SNCC focused on
strengthening their skills, confidence, and resolve, they argued, all else
would flow from that strength.25
undertook its massive voter registration campaign in Mississippi
under the umbrella of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a
Mississippi-based coalition that was originally organized by Aaron
Henry as an ad hoc group in 1961 and was reconstituted a year later by
the new constellation of organizations active in the state. It included
SNCC, core, a somewhat reluctant NAACP, and an even less active SCLC.26
Much of the personnel and leadership came from SNCC and core. In 1962,
COFO received a $14,000 grant through the Voter Education Project (VEP)
administered by the Southern Regional Council, with funds provided by
SNCC
the Field and Taconic Foundations. The money helped defray the costs of
purchasing supplies, printing literature, and providing subsistence-level
stipends (in some cases ten dollars a week) to organizers, who were
called field staff.27 While COFO was most visible to the campaign's
northern, white supporters, SNCC and, in some places, core represented
the campaign to black Mississippians.
Of the nearly two dozen local projects that SNCC initiated in
Mississippi during the early 1960s—including ones in Canton, Holly
Springs, Natchez, Harmony, Clarksdale, and Jackson—the movement in
the Delta community of Greenwood perhaps best reflected the spirit of
organizing that Ella Baker advocated. Here, in what would become
SNCC'S state headquarters, lucrative cotton plantations were thriving
while white vigilantes carried out ruthless repression. In the summer of
1962, young Sam Block, a native of Cleveland, Mississippi, and one of
Amzie Moore's protégés, arrived on the scene and began the tedious
process of meeting people, building relationships, trying to identify local
militants, and earning people's trust through his dogged perseverance,
thus following Baker's edict that activists meet people where they are.
Block walked the streets and met local people. He not only talked to
people about SNCC, voting rights, segregation; he also listened to the
locals talk about their fears, concerns, and aspirations. Eventually, he
asked people to come together in small meetings at the Elks Hall, where
at first all they did was sing freedom songs. He gradually introduced
political topics to the discussion. The project was slow to gain
momentum, but after a while Greenwood would produce some of SNCC'S
most talented and hard-working local organizers, such as Laura McGhee
and June Johnson. Julian Bond, a SNCC leader, described Sam Block's
organizing style as essentially the formula for SNCC'S day-to-day work:
“SNCC organizers spent their first weeks in a new community meeting
local leadership, formulating with them an action plan for more
aggressive registration efforts, and recruiting new activists through
informal conversation, painstaking house to house canvassing, and
regular mass meetings.”28
While Greenwood remained a vital center of movement activity
throughout the 1960s, SNCC'S work in Ruleville, Mississippi, in adjacent
Sunflower County, attracted a middle-aged black woman who would
come to personify the heart and soul of the Mississippi movement:
Fannie Lou Hamer. One of twenty children born to impoverished
sharecroppers in Montgomery County, Mississippi, Hamer never had the
opportunity to obtain much formal education, but she was acutely aware
of the world around her and the injustices that defined it. A woman of
deep religious faith, she once remarked that the civil rights movement
appealed to her as much as it did because she was simply “sick and tired
of being sick and tired.” When in August 1962 SNCC'S James Forman and
SCLC's James Bevel held a meeting about voter registration in Ruleville,
Hamer was in attendance and volunteered, along with seventeen others,
to travel to nearby Indianola, the closest courthouse, to register to vote.
On her return home, she was fired from the plantation she had worked on
for eighteen years; later, she was harassed and shot at by local vigilantes.
These attacks only steeled her resolve, she allied herself with SNCC and
began to work full time for the movement. In 1963, on her way back
from a voter registration workshop in Charleston, South Carolina, Hamer
and several others were jailed in Winona County and beaten in retaliation
for their activism, an experience that Hamer would never forget and
would often talk about. Buoyed by her strong religious faith, she was
undeterred. What did she have to lose? she reasoned. “The only thing
they could do to me was to kill me and it seemed like they'd been trying
to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”29
The first statewide campaign that SNCC and COFO carried out in
Mississippi, and in which Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker were
intimately involved, was Freedom Vote. Held in November 1963, this
was a mock election campaign meant to prove that the black electorate
would cast their ballots if they were not blocked or intimidated from
doing so. The campaign was carried out with the aid of student
volunteers, most of whom were white, many of them from elite northern
universities. Bob Moses, Ella Baker, and Amzie Moore had long
understood that bringing outside resources to bear on the situation in
Mississippi was necessary if things were ever going to change. Who,
when, and on what terms were always in question. Allard Lowenstein, an
eccentric white liberal activist and part-time academic, became the
controversial figure at the center of the effort to get some of the attention
and human resources the movement so desperately needed.
Unfortunately, he made every effort to try to define the terms on which
that support would be provided, which meant that he wanted the focus to
be on him and his own liberal Cold War agenda. With some reservations,
Moses agreed to allow Lowenstein, who had been introduced to SNCC
through Clarksdale activist Aaron Henry, to recruit some of his former
students from Yale and Stanford to work on the Freedom Vote mock
election.30 The decision to accept the role proposed for Lowenstein and
this new cohort of volunteers was not made lightly. It would have farreaching consequences, both positive and negative, for the evolution of
the Mississippi movement.
The plan was to have volunteers travel around the state collecting
ballots in an unofficial election process free of intimidating and
uncooperative registrars and other deterrents that typically thwarted
black participation. A successful turn-out would expose the fact that
vigilante violence, economic harassment, and blatant corruption, not
apathy, were the obstacles that rendered 98 percent of the state's black
electorate voteless.31 Organizers ran an interracial slate in the November
election, in part to demonstrate that the campaign was not solely about
race but about building a more inclusive democracy in Mississippi. The
gubernatorial candidate was Aaron Henry, the black Clarksdale
pharmacist and state NAACP president, and Ed King, the antiracist white
chaplain of Tougaloo College, ran for lieutenant governor.32
While there may have been some rationale for a biracial gubernatorial
ticket in 1963, the reason that two men headed a political campaign in
which women formed the largest base of local support is more complex.
It foreshadowed the intricate gender politics of the late 1960s.
Some men and women in SNCC felt that black men should be the
titular heads of black freedom organizations, thus serving as a counter to
the racist culture that sought to systematically relegate them to the
denigrated status of boys.33 Some also felt that black women, long
denied the “provisions” and “protection” ostensibly afforded to southern
white ladies, deserved to be shielded from the harshest aspects of
political combat. These sentiments notwithstanding, there were
inclinations and ideological influences pulling SNCC and local activists in
another, more egalitarian, direction. Passionate new democratic
tendencies pushed hard against old patriarchal habits. The determination
to allow each individual to make a contribution and play a role in his or
her own emancipation; the emphasis on giving voice and space to those
who had previously been excluded from leadership; and the desire to
“free men's minds” as Charles Sherrod once put it—all of these
sentiments (none of which were articulated specifically in terms of
gender) informed the creation of a fluid structure in which women's
leadership could and did thrive.34
The inclination toward inclusion and a genuinely participatory
democracy militated against the tendency to replicate the dominant
society's concept of proper gender roles, which most black southern
colleges actively encouraged. Even though the violation of dominant
gender roles may have seemed an awkward form of racial transgression
(black women who challenge sexism to this day are sometimes made to
feel like betrayers of black men), it was a violation many women in SNCC
made in their actions, if not in their verbal or written expressions. This
nonsexist climate was attributable in no small measure to Ella Baker's
influence. Writer Carol Mueller argues that Baker actually introduced the
concept of participatory democracy to the progressive movements of the
1960s.35 Others attribute it to Tom Hayden of the Students for a
Democratic Society. Whether or not Baker technically introduced the
idea, she lived and breathed and modeled it. It was the practice of a new
type of inclusive, consensus-oriented democracy, which opened
organizational doors to women, young people, and those outside of the
cadre of educated elites. Baker helped mold a political environment that
did not offer any explicitly feminist rhetoric but in practice countered
overt sexist practices and rigidly circumscribed gender roles. This does
not mean that sexism did not exist— but it was not institutionally
supported or encouraged.
There were chauvinist comments, to be sure. The most often-cited is
Stokely Carmichael's off-handed remark in 1964 that the role of women
in the struggle was “prone.” Even so, there was no serious language,
consistent with SNCC'S ethos, that allowed Carmichael or anyone else to
justifiably exclude women, especially black women, from work they
wanted to do.36 This was one of the points he wanted to make
emphatically in an interview in 1995 when he was deathly ill and
bedridden. “I would not have been taken seriously as a leader of an
organization like SNCC if I had not taken seriously the leadership of
women,” he insisted. “A woman like Ella Baker would not have
tolerated it,” he added.37 Carmichael's actions back up his words to a
large extent. He appointed several women to posts as project directors
during his tenure as chairman and applauded and occasionally deferred
to the leadership of women like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Some sociologists and some historians argue that as the 1960s wore
on and militancy increased, a certain macho rhetoric began to undermine
the full participation of women. This is only partly true. There was
indeed more macho rhetoric, but militancy and radicalism, if defined
broadly, were not masculine domains. In fact, in the latter half of the
1960s more women were in charge of SNCC projects than during the first
half. Those sectors of the movement most prone to subjugating and
marginalizing women were those individuals and organizations that
portrayed women in a “black nation” as supportive complements to male
political and decision-making roles. It was this kind of romanticized
male dominance that Ella Baker worried about, although this was not a
commonly held view in SNCC. Still, she felt it was important enough that
she made a public statement about it. In a 1969 speech to the Institute of
the Black World in Atlanta, she raised a concern that she discussed more
in depth in an interview with John Britton a year earlier. This was the
idea that a distorted view of black history led some in the movement to
argue that women were beholden to men. Baker argued against the
“concept,” prevalent after 1965, “that black women had to bolster the
ego of the male.” In her words, “This implied that the black male had
been treated in such a manner as to have been emasculated both by white
society and by black women because the female was the head of the
household. We began to deal with the question of the need of black
women to play the subordinate role. I personally have never thought of
this as being valid.”
By the late 1960s, SNCC embodied many variations of nationalism, but
the more sexist formulations of cultural nationalists that Baker pointed to
never materialized. Women like Muriel Tillinghast, Fay Bellamy, and
Ruby Doris Smith Robinson were vocal in bringing the organization's
popular chairman, Carmichael, down a notch or two when he began to
make statements without consulting the organization.38 From 1960 until
the organization's demise, many committed and capable women
organizers found the expression of their political ambitions in SNCC, in
ways that were simply not possible in SCLC or even the NAACP. As
Charles Payne put it: “Women obviously represented an enormous pool
of untapped leadership potential… . SNCC, despite the traditional
expectations of sex roles held by many of its members, was structurally
and philosophically open to female participation in a way that many
older organizations would not have been.”39 And if any place was fertile
ground for the growth of black women's leadership, it was Mississippi.
While the struggle for political power in Mississippi represented a
landmark in the southern-based struggle for black freedom, that forward
movement came at a hefty price. Violence, harassment, and intimidation
escalated, and movement leaders lived with the constant threat of
attack.40 And women were not spared. Homes and offices were routinely
firebombed, and arrests, beatings, and death threats were commonplace.
Regular acts of violence directed at so-called uppity or dissident black
individuals had kept the old order in place. As the black resistance
movement grew, violence was increasingly directed at it.
Ella Baker got a first-hand look at the political terrorism that
dominated the local scene when she traveled through the state drumming
up support for the Freedom Vote campaign in the fall of 1963. On
October 31, Halloween night, Baker and two of her young colleagues
had a frightening encounter with a gang of local white thugs. Baker had
just delivered a speech to a group of black businessmen in Natchez,
Mississippi. The engagement had not been a rousing success. Baker was
anxious to move on to her next appointment in Port Gibson, some forty
miles away. Two volunteers, George Green, a twenty-year-old African
American activist from Greenwood, and Bruce Payne, a twenty-oneyear-old white political science graduate student from Yale University,
were assigned to escort her from Natchez to her next stop. Even though
she virtually lived on the road, Baker had never learned to drive; so she
often relied on others to help her get from place to place.
When Payne arrived to pick Baker up at the house where she had been
staying, he told her he was being followed. In an obvious gesture of
intimidation, the two cars that had been following him circled the house
while he was inside. After some hesitation, Baker, Payne, and Green
decided to take their chances and travel as planned. When they started
off, the cars continued to follow them; and when they stopped for
directions at a gas station outside of Natchez, Payne was attacked and
brutally beaten. As he got out of the car, the men jumped out of their car
and punched and kicked him; they banged his head against the gas
pumps before jumping back into their car and speeding off. Although
Payne suffered facial lacerations and bruises, he did not need to be
hospitalized, and the threesome drove on to Port Gibson, where they
immediately filed complaints with the U.S. Attorney General's Office
and the FBI. Several days later, Green and Payne, who were both warned
to stay out of town, had another run-in with the two same men and were
shot at and run off the road.41
Ella Baker had seen the ugly face of southern vigilantism many times,
yet every encounter was horrifying. The beating she witnessed that
Halloween proved to be a preview of the even more deadly violence that
awaited SNCC activists as their campaign for racial and economic justice
in Mississippi shifted into high gear. Baker was both fearful and
determined. Despite harassment and intimidation by local officials,
between 80,000 and 85,000 Mississippians cast their ballots for Freedom
candidates. The mock election contradicted the myth that blacks in the
state were politically apathetic and would not vote even if given the
opportunity.
Despite the relative success of Freedom Vote that year, 1963 was
marked by escalating violence against the southern-based Black Freedom
Movement and in the society in general. The type of assault Baker
witnessed outside Natchez was not uncommon. Between February and
May 1963, SNCC workers and supporters in Greenwood were under
constant threat, enduring shootings, firebombings, beatings, and arrests.
In June, protesters in Danville were so brutally beaten by local police
after a series of desegregation protests that observers labeled the event
“Bloody Monday.” Medgar Evers, an NAACP organizer, was shot to death
in the driveway of his home that same month. His assassination sent
anger and fear ricocheting through movement circles and elevated Evers
to the status of a national martyr.42 Headlines across the country
blazoned the brutal force that Birmingham's police chief, Eugene “Bull”
Connor, unleashed against young civil rights demonstrators and the racist
recalcitrance of Alabama's newly elected governor, George Wallace, who
made a personal pledge to block school desegregation in the state. The
violence in Alabama peaked in September 1963 with the bombing of
Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, resulting in the tragic deaths
of four young black children. The year was also punctuated by events
that put civil rights on the national political agenda. The widely
publicized March on Washington was held in August 1963, and
President Kennedy met with key black leaders before the march. Some
civil rights leaders were optimistic, while others saw the continued
violence as the prelude to a second Civil War. The assassination of
President Kennedy in November struck many as a culmination of the
crescendo of violence that had been building up the whole year. While
the nation mourned the death of the president, movement activists
mourned the growing number of those wounded and killed within its
own ranks. Civil rights advocates wondered whether the new president,
Lyndon B. Johnson, a liberal Texan, would be more or less sympathetic
to the growing black freedom struggle and willing to defend it against
the attacks it was suffering.
REFLECTING ON EXPERIENCE AND
SETTING A COURSE
In November 1963, a week after the Freedom Vote, COFO leaders,
including members of SNCC, came together for a meeting in Greenville to
reflect on their experiences in the voter registration campaign and the
events of the year and to make plans for the group's future work.43 One
of the most contentious topics of discussion was the role of white
students within COFO, particularly the upper-middle-class whites who had
been recruited by Lowenstein to work on the November campaign. It
was at the Greenville meeting that the idea for Freedom Summer began
to percolate. Even though Bob Moses supported the idea of utilizing
white volunteers in the project, there was not unanimous support. John
Dittmer reported that “many of the veteran organizers favored, at best, a
limited future role for white students,” and some were opposed even to
that. Ivanhoe Donaldson, a SNCC staff person, made his feelings known:
“I came into SNCC and saw Negroes running things and I felt good.”
Inviting an influx of whites, he concluded, would mean that they would
be losing “the one thing where the Negro can stand first.” The heated
discussion included accusations that the presence of rich white students
might reinforce a deferential “slavery mentality” in southern blacks. This
meeting was the continuation of a long and layered process of grappling
with the movement's internal racial dynamics.44
At year's end, the SNCC staff met again, this time in Atlanta, in order
to revisit some of the issues that had been debated so passionately in
Greenville and to confront other dilemmas as well. As was SNCC'S
practice by 1963, the five-day meeting was divided into two parts. For
the first four days, there was open discussion involving staff, ex-staff,
and advisers, which presented an opportunity to discuss any issues of
concern that people wanted to raise. The final day was “a closed
executive committee [meeting] in which final decisions and
implementation were decided upon, based on the consensus of the larger
meeting.”45 Ella Baker participated actively in both parts of this
important gathering.
The marathon meeting in Atlanta proved, if nothing else, that SNCC'S
members had moved decidedly to the left. While the events of 1964
would further radicalize some individuals within the organization,
transforming them from reformists into dedicated revolutionaries, the
tone and substance of the discussions at this key meeting indicate that by
December 1963 a core element of SNCC'S leadership was already there.
Those in attendance included Bob Moses, Charles Sherrod, Frank Smith,
Gloria Richardson, John Lewis, Courtland Cox, Michael Thelwell,
Stokely Carmichael, Jim Forman, Dottie Zellner, Ivanhoe Donaldson,
and Joyce Ladner, along with a host of staff and volunteers who floated
in and out. Gloria Richardson's presence is particularly significant
because she had just led a pitched battle with police in the streets of
Cambridge, Maryland, in which shots were fired on both sides, protesters
were teargassed, and many feared for their lives. The demands of the
Cambridge activists were economic as well as political; the large number
of unemployed workers there wanted jobs, as well as elected officials
who were accountable to community needs.46
The scope of the questions that the group wrestled with over the
course of the five-day gathering was posed by Howard Zinn in a
presentation on the first day. Having consulted with Baker beforehand
about the state of the movement and the proposals that would be
considered, Zinn presented their joint views when he spoke. Sounding
much like Baker, he posed the questions: “What is our economic and
political goal? What kind of revolution do we want?” Pushing SNCC to
clarify and more clearly articulate its priorities, Zinn asked, “Do we
compromise on some questions to achieve other goals?” He went on to
juxtapose long- and short-term goals and suggested the importance of
having an organizational structure that could help realize those goals.
Baker immediately seconded Zinn's commentary and urged that there be
a more in-depth and focused political discussion of some of the points he
had raised before any policy decisions were made. This was Freirean
teaching by two masters of the technique. Through a series of probing
questions, the two veteran activists challenged their young counterparts
to tap their own experiences in order to come up with the answers.47 At
the same time, they did not hesitate to put their own views on the table.
Zinn was very specific in his attack on “the profit motive”; he
emphasized that “the race problem, where SNCC got its start, has emerged
into a different and bigger issue.” Baker had always believed that the
fight against racism was a “bigger issue,” with economic, cultural, and
international implications that could serve as a catalyst for more
comprehensive social change agendas.48
Baker reminded those at the Atlanta meeting that the purpose of voter
registration efforts was not simply to enable black people to cast a ballot
for one political party or the other. For her, voter registration, like
integration, was never an end in itself, even if the campaign's outside
funders may have thought so. “We got into the Voter Education Project
program as a convenient method of organizing and working in the field,
knowing we might lose the money because we weren't serving VEP's
purpose,” she argued.49
The role of whites in the upcoming summer project was also taken up
again. Moses pointed out that the earlier COFO meeting in Greenville had
decided to limit the number of white volunteers to 100, but the plan
being “pushed by Al Lowenstein [was to] pour in thousands of students
and force a showdown between local and federal governments in an
election year.”50 Joyce Ladner then questioned whether “there might be a
negative reaction from local Negro leadership because of this outside
invasion.”51 Marion Barry “argued in favor of the saturation proposal,”
insisting it was SNCC'S “big chance to force Johnson to commit
himself.”52 Moses declined to give a “personal opinion” because it was
“a divisive issue,” stating he would defer to the will of the group.53 Ella
Baker too was silent at this point, allowing the group to air its feelings;
she would weigh in on the issue at a subsequent meeting.
There were disagreements on this and other issues, but what was most
palpable in this lengthy discussion was that no one on SNCC'S core staff
was thinking along the narrow lines of integration and gradual, legal
reform, as most had been in 1960. Instead, they were considering broader
goals and strategies that would empower the masses of black people.
Activists espoused competing visions of the specific goals and objectives
of the movement, but all were looking for a longer-term, more radical
perspective. Their political ambitions had swelled along with their
courage and determination. Frank Smith's comments in the meeting are
but one example of the militant positions that were being put forward:
“We need to get more hungry people to be massed to turn over the
government … what we need on February 1 is not a demonstration but a
general strike.”54
As the discussion grew more intense, Moses intervened to suggest
that what the group really needed was a systematic program of study to
assess the implications of one course of action versus another. Zinn and
Baker had hoped that such a program would come out of the meeting,
not as a way to delay a move toward greater militancy but rather to
ensure that the move was a steady and sober one. Following up on
Moses's suggestion, Zinn urged SNCC to “enlist some of the best minds
around” to explore ways of transforming or reordering the society. Zinn
further pointed out that many academics had historical and theoretical
understandings but lacked the close contact with grassroots people and
struggles that informed SNCC activists' views. After several hours, “Ella
Baker expressed the consensus of the group, that SNCC develop a formal
program of economic education for its staff.”55
Zinn later led a discussion on internal staff education and posed the
dilemma of activist-intellectuals: “Education in the classroom tends to be
removed from the real problems because educators are by nature
removed from where most people live. That is the nature of academic
life and why most SNCC workers have left it.”56 Zinn proposed a different
type of education and scholarship, one grounded in political struggle and
everyday life. A priority for Ella Baker was to ensure that the group was
thinking through carefully the political implications of the actions being
planned. She gently criticized the group for placing “too much value on
action and not enough on planning,” strongly supporting the proposal for
expanding internal education, and later requesting permission to pull
together a broader group of advisers, beyond just herself and Zinn, to
help the young activists navigate their way forward. The group agreed.57
The December meeting was intense and exhausting. Many sessions
lasted well into the night; even on New Year's Eve, the group did not
adjourn until 9:30 P.M.58 The meeting proved to be a pivotal moment in
the life of the organization, and Ella Baker was actively engaged in
pushing the process along. The leadership group emerged with a
deepened commitment to the poor and working class and to the
economic issues that plagued their lives; a more open and flexible,
although still ill-defined, policy on self-defense, reaffirming the tactical
efficacy of nonviolence while factoring in local traditions of selfprotection; and finally a reiterated commitment to the importance of
education within the movement.
FREEDOM DAY, JANUARY 1964
January 22, 1964, was designated Freedom Day in Hattiesburg,
Mississippi, and SNCC'S leadership convened again, this time for a day of
action rather than of talking. Freedom Days were frequently organized as
a specific time to orchestrate massive voter registration efforts in a
public fashion. Cleveland Sellers remembered these events as affirming
and proud moments for the young organizers: “There is nothing so aweinspiring as a middle aged sharecropper trudging up the steps to the voter
registrars office clad in brogans, denim overalls, and a freshly starched
white shirt—his only one. I grew to love Freedom Days. More than
anything else they provided the motivation that kept me going.”59
A medium-sized city by Mississippi standards, located in the
southwest quadrant of the state, Hattiesburg had a resistance tradition
that dated back to the 1940s and before. During the late 1950s, NAACP
militants such as Vernon Dahmer and Medgar Evers, two movement
martyrs, had worked to build an NAACP youth chapter in the city. Joyce
and Dorie Ladner, who became legendary SNCC organizers, grew up in
Hattiesburg and were mentored by Dahmer and other local activists.
Both women also acknowledged Ella Baker as an empowering role
model who inspired, taught, and encouraged them as they matured
politically. Despite the efforts at activism, there had not been much
progress in Hattiesburg by 1962. So blatant was the disenfranchisement
of blacks there that the federal government had indicted the local
registrar, Theron Lynd, for his persistent refusal to register qualified
black voters. Injunctions notwithstanding, Lynd continued to hold his
post in defiance of federal mandates and continued to deny Negro
citizens the right to vote.60
In the spring of 1962, SNCC workers Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins
arrived in Forrest County, of which Hattiesburg was a part, and began
organizing. In the SNCC tradition, such organizing meant getting rooted
and building personal relationships that could be converted into political
ones. By November, Hayes and Watkins had built a core of local
supporters, rented a house that served as SNCC'S headquarters, and held
several small informal meetings.61SNCC'S civil rights organizing focused
more attention on the sleepy little town than its residents expected. Bob
Moses and Dona Richards, also a dedicated SNCC activist, had just
married. They moved into the second floor of the SNCC headquarters and
devoted their time and energies to the organizing effort in Hattiesburg.
Over many months of agitation and steady, tedious outreach, SNCC
developed a base in Hattiesburg that included the likes of the tireless
seventy-year-old Mrs. Virgie Robinson and a homemaker and small
business person Victoria Gray, who joined SNCC'S staff full time in
September of 1962.62
There was a special emphasis on the 1964 Freedom Day in
Hattiesburg. Encouraged by their success in the mock elections in
November and eager to keep the momentum going, SNCC members,
working within the context of COFO, planned a massive one-day voter
registration campaign targeting Hattiesburg. This strategy closely
resembled the R-day protests that Baker had organized with the
Simpkinses in Shreveport several years earlier. On January 21, new
troops arrived in town, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and
Dave Dennis, core's Mississippi director. Ella Baker and John Lewis,
who traveled together by train from Atlanta, arrived in the late afternoon.
By that time, a serious strategy session was under way at the SNCC
headquarters to plan the next day's events. Organizers made detailed
contingency plans in case of arrests and the ever-present possibility of
police or vigilante violence, which in Mississippi were often one and the
same. Since some fifty ministers and rabbis were coming to Hattiesburg
from northern cities to act as observers, SNCC planners felt sure that the
national media would also be present in force.63
As Baker considered the strategies being proposed for Freedom Day,
she also mulled over the speech she was scheduled to deliver at the mass
meeting later that evening. The strategy session had to be cut short in
order for the group to walk over to the church, which was already
overflowing with Hattiesburg residents. As one participant described it,
“Every seat [was] filled, every aisle packed, the doorways jammed; it
was almost impossible to get in.”64 The speakers on the roster had all
earned their battle scars in the struggle: John Lewis had been bloodied
during the Freedom Rides; Annelle Ponder had been beaten with Fannie
Lou Hamer in the Winona County Jail; and Lawrence Guyot, the young
SNCC worker from Louisiana, had done time in the Mississippi's
notorious Parchman Prison. All were inspirational. Baker sat patiently
nodding and applauding the other speakers' remarks. And then it was her
turn.
Aaron Henry, the Freedom gubernatorial candidate, gave his longtime co-worker a special introduction. There was mutual respect between
the two veteran activists as they shared the stage that evening. Henry was
the son of Mississippi sharecroppers who served in World War II, then
went to college on the GI bill, and became active in the NAACP. He had
been jailed, harassed, and firebombed.65 In other words, he had paid his
political dues and earned Baker's respect in the process. A reluctant but
gifted orator, Baker lived up to the praise Henry had bestowed on her.
She began her remarks by reminding the crowd, “We have come here
tonight to renew our struggle.” Evoking the memory of Medgar Evers,
the Mississippi organizer who had been shot dead by Ku Klux Klan
assassins when he returned home from a late-night meeting only six
months before, Baker roused the crowd. Evers had spent time in
Hattiesburg, and the people there knew and loved him. Her remarks were
punctuated by applause and shouts of “amen.” Evers's murder was a
painful and sobering reminder of the risks entailed in the actions they
were collectively undertaking that evening. Although the next day's
events were on everyone's mind, Baker did not address the immediate
questions at hand; rather, she took the opportunity to remind her
audience of the movement's larger goals. This was Baker the
revolutionary in action, transcending more attendant concerns and
reaching for something larger, greater, more inspirational. What was at
stake? What were they really fighting for and why? These were the
fundamental questions Baker wanted her audience to ponder.66
As Howard Zinn's report on Baker's speech attests, she offered her
listeners “a vision beyond the immediate.” She advised those gathered
that evening that, even as they prepared to face hostile crowds and
potentially violent police in defense of their right to vote and to use
public facilities like any other citizen, these goals alone were not enough.
She challenged her listeners to consider the importance of economic and
systemic changes, insisting that “even if segregation is gone, we will still
need to be free; we will still have to see that everyone has a job. Even if
we can all vote, but if people are still hungry, we will not be free …
Singing alone is not enough; we need schools and learning …
Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but
for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses
all of mankind.”67 For many people, the movement was about the ballot
and defeating Jim Crow, but in Hattiesburg and elsewhere Baker pushed
repeatedly, passionately, and irrepressibly against those cramped
ambitions to draw people toward a more comprehensive vision.
Reiterating the sentiments expressed at the SNCC retreat a month before,
she stressed the importance of linking economic justice to racial justice:
“People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give
everybody a job.” We are not free, she continued, because “in this
country, in a land of great plenty and great wealth, there are millions of
people who go to bed hungry every night.”68 As SNCC embarked on
another leg of its historic crusade into Mississippi, Ella Baker reminded
both young organizers and veteran activists alike that poverty and class
inequality and racism were intimately and inextricably bound up together
and had to be a part of any truly liberatory freedom agenda.
On Freedom Day, over 150 local black citizens showed up on the
steps of the Hattiesburg courthouse to register, in a town where—
according to activists' estimates—only a handful of blacks who were
eligible to vote were actually registered. Many of them had been in the
church meeting the night before. Few were successful in registering, but
organizers were pleased with the turnout and with the protesters'
determination. Some aspiring black voters stayed on the courthouse steps
from 9:30 in the morning until late in the afternoon despite the pouring
rain.69
Hattiesburg was one of many sites of struggle in the campaign to
desegregate and democratize the state of Mississippi during the 1960s,
and each one of those sites had battle scars as a result. SNCC offices and
the homes where SNCC organizers were staying were firebombed. Felony
charges were leveled against organizers, and some did prison time as a
result. In this intense and violent time, there was the scent of freedom in
the air, and young people flocked to SNCC and its affiliate organizations
to be a part of the social revolution that was sweeping the South, the
epicenter of which was Mississippi. In a series of long and difficult staff
and executive committee meetings, between January and June, Ella
Baker assiduously guided, nurtured, and steadied the group as it built up
steam going into Freedom Summer.
FREEDOM SUMMER
Freedom Summer was the most widely publicized of the SNCC projects in
Mississippi, in part because hundreds of student volunteers arrived in
Mississippi in several successive waves to aid the ongoing Black
Freedom Movement in the state. After a brief but intense orientation in
Oxford, Ohio, the summer volunteers—the overwhelming majority of
whom were white—were assigned to projects throughout Mississippi
with the expectation that they would assist more experienced field staff
in voter education and registration campaigns, staffing freedom schools
and keeping the offices up and running.
The concept of Freedom Summer was to draw northern white students
directly into the battle for racial democracy in the South and give them,
their families, and communities—and hopefully the nation—a greater
stake in the outcome. The 1963 Freedom Vote campaign had been the
trial run. Charles Payne explains that the unchecked violence against
black Mississippians was one of the principal factors that convinced Bob
Moses of the need to pull other forces into the fray.70 There had been
five mysterious murders in the state between December 1963 and
February 1964, but few people outside the area seemed to notice or to
care. As a white SNCC staff member, Mendy Samstein, put it, before 1964
Mississippi organizers often felt isolated without any “relief from the
daily and brutal confrontation they had with the whole local state system.
There was no relief from that, there was no outrage … when Negroes
were beaten or killed. Nobody seemed to care about that, nobody seemed
to give a damn.”71 Black southerners had been resisting racism,
collectively and individually, all along, placing themselves in danger
with each challenge to white rule. The new idea was to ask others to take
some of the risks and in the process to raise the stakes.
The renewed black freedom struggle had never been a blacks-only
affair. Whites had been involved from the beginning. A handful of
whites participated in the sit-ins, and a larger number, many of them
northerners, had participated in SNCC'S founding conference. And Bob
Zellner, Bill Hansen, Connie Curry, Jane Stembridge, Mary King, and
Casey Hayden had been involved with SNCC for two or three years by
1963. With Charles Sherrod's encouragement, white organizers had
begun working in the Southwest Georgia Project in small numbers in the
summer of 1963.72 However, Freedom Summer would bring many
unseasoned volunteers into Mississippi to work in communities
alongside blacks in all facets of the organizing effort. At the outset, the
two principal concerns were whether they would in some way undermine
or usurp less confident black leadership and whether their mere presence
would provoke local whites to more acts of violence. Baker understood
these concerns, but she was a steadfast supporter of the project. In a
series of SNCC executive committee meetings, she laid out her reasons.
On June 9-11, 1964, before the summer volunteers descended on
Mississippi, SNCC veterans cloistered themselves away for a two-day
meeting and retreat to review one last time the politics surrounding the
project, examining what they wanted to accomplish and what dangers
and obstacles they would likely encounter over the course of the summer.
Ella Baker played an active role in the meeting. She began by framing
the purpose of the project in this way: “One of the reasons we're going
into Mississippi is that the rest of the United States has never felt much
responsibility for what happens in the Deep South. The country feels no
responsibility and doesn't see that as an indictment. Young people will
make the Justice Department move… . If we can simply let the concept
that the rest of the nation bears responsibility for what happens in
Mississippi sink in, then we will have accomplished something.”73
SELF-DEFENSE AND NONVIOLENCE IN
THE SUMMER PROJECT
Another key issue taken up at the June meeting was the likelihood of
violence against SNCC staff, volunteers, and allies and the implications of
any form of self-defense. To some, it already seemed a bit of an
oxymoron to call the movement nonviolent when it was under violent
assault almost daily. And even though SNCC'S name still embodied the
concept of nonviolence, four years of vicious assaults, including several
murders, had led some activists to reconsider that philosophical stance.
For some veterans of the struggle, nonviolence was an ideal whose
practical viability had faded over time. There had also been a turnover in
SNCC personnel. Some of the more recent recruits had never been
invested in the concept of nonviolence, regarding it as a reasonable tactic
given the array of firepower amassed against the movement in the South,
but never embracing it as a way of life, as most of the Nashville group
had. The question of nonviolence was also reconfigured at this point
because earlier political activity had been of a mass, public nature.
Getting arrested or being beaten when standing with a group of
protesters on the courthouse steps was very different from being attacked
by vigilantes while driving on lonely roads at night. Doing grassroots
work in communities where organizers lived in isolated areas with local
families meant that they might encounter a different type of violence
altogether.
One sobering factor for the young organizers was the fact that so
many of the southern black people with whom they worked in the early
1960s were armed and prepared to shoot if shot at. The nonviolence
training that freedom riders had received in 1961 and Freedom Summer
volunteers received as a part of their orientation in 1964 emphasized
avoiding conflict and deflecting blows if attacked; it did not prepare
them to dodge bullets or consider how they might respond to local black
traditions of self-defense. Many of the indigenous leaders whom SNCC
workers encountered were not disciples of nonviolence at all. For them,
being armed and ready to fire if fired on was a more effective deterrent
to vigilante attacks than turning the other cheek. As Bob Moses summed
up the contradiction, “We were nonviolent, but we were in the houses of
people with rifles.” He pointed out that Amzie Moore, whom he
identified as his political father, sat up at night with a rifle across his lap
protecting his home, his family, and the activists who were passing
through. Amzie Moore shared Ella Baker's views about the limits of
nonviolence.74
Baker was generally respectful of the commitment that some young
people still had to the concept of nonviolence. Yet, when she was most
candid, as she was in a 1980 interview, she acknowledged her inability to
be passive in the face of violence: “I frankly could not have sat and let
someone put a burning cigarette on the back of my neck as some young
people did. Whether this is right or wrong or good or bad, I have already
been conditioned, and I have not seen anything in the nonviolent
technique that can dissuade me from challenging somebody who wants
to step on my neck.”75
When the issue of nonviolence came up in the June meeting, Baker
spoke her mind. Charlie Cobb posed a question about a hypothetical
situation in which a SNCC staff member or volunteer would come to the
aid of a local person who was fighting back in self-defense. Would SNCC
support this person? Baker's response was: “I can't conceive of the SNCC I
thought I was associated with not defending Charlie Cobb. What is the
basis on which it is now necessary to raise this question? In my book,
Charlie would not be operating outside of SNCC if he did what he said.”76
Baker shared her views in other contexts as well. Stokely Carmichael
(Kwame Ture) recalled conversations with Baker in which she openly
discussed her support of black farmers in the 1940s who carried guns to
defend themselves when their NAACP involvement became known and
their physical safety was threatened.77 Judy Richardson recalled that
three stalwart local supporters of the Mississippi movement, E. W.
Steptoe and Hartman and Sweets Turnbow, were known to have a
shotgun nearby in any situation and were also known to profess their
intentions to use a gun in self-defense if the need arose.78 Bob Moses
explained to Mary King: “Self-defense is so deeply engrained in rural
southern America that we as a small group can't affect it. It's not a
contradiction for a farmer to say he's nonviolent and also pledge to shoot
a marauder's head off.”79
The group listened to Baker's admonitions about not carrying their
philosophical commitment to nonviolence too far, but for security
reasons they decided it was best to avoid associations with weapons of
any kind. The group voted officially the next day to bar any summer
project participant from carrying a weapon. On a practical level, Baker
agreed with this position, pointing out the likelihood that carrying guns
would only give local sheriffs an excuse to use even greater force against
the movement. How to negotiate this thorny issue in day-to-day
situations was in practice left up to each individual's conscience. Some
individuals did carry weapons at various times over the course of the
summer and thereafter, but this was never a part of SNCC'S official
policy.80
Another equally difficult issue that came up at the June meeting
concerned the racial and political implications of allowing so many
whites to join the ranks of the southern-based movement. A young
volunteer, Willie Blue, questioned whether blacks would let white civil
rights workers into their homes. This had been a problem in other
projects. Hollis Watkins asked how black activists would deal with their
own “hatred of whites.” And Don Harris further questioned whether the
egos and confidence of local blacks would be diminished by the presence
of educated white northerners. Baker cut through the litany of questions
with a decisive challenge to the group: “The conversation sounds like
this is the first discussion of white involvement. The problem is basically
one of insecurity: Perhaps we have an inflated ego. Are we prepared to
take the revolution one step further? We can't grow without examining
our own [fears and doubts].”81 Baker's meaning here is best understood
by placing her comments in a broader context. The marathon meeting
had drifted from discussions of direct action and bond money to
“animosity” toward Mississippi staff members “because of the emphasis
given to Mississippi.”82 It had ended up considering the problems that
white volunteers might present. If SNCC activists were serious, Baker was
saying, they would have to stretch beyond their differences, fears, and
inhibitions to build a larger movement, forge uncomfortable but
principled alliances, and raise the stakes in Mississippi. That is precisely
what they did.
The influx of hundreds of young white students into the small towns
and cities of Mississippi produced culture shock on both sides. It was not
the southern dialect, the pace of life, or the food that represented the
biggest challenge for the new arrivals; it was the sobering intensity of the
situation the volunteers found themselves in. For those who might not
have been fully aware of what could be in store for them as the trekked
down to Dixie, June 20 was a baptism by fire. On that day, local
authorities arrested three young civil rights workers—Michael
Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—who had been
investigating a church bombing. They were reportedly released from jail
and then mysteriously disappeared and were never heard from again.
Their disappearance—and the eventual discovery of their brutally
murdered bodies—brought a huge amount of public attention to the
project and had a chilling effect on all those involved, especially SNCC'S
newest recruits. The case of the three missing civil rights workers, whose
fate remained unknown all that summer, offered a graphic illustration of
the dangerous ground SNCC veterans and volunteers were traversing.
Still, only a handful of the volunteers withdrew from involvement after
the disappearance of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. But another
critical question arose: was the movement exploiting the naive young
volunteers who had ventured south over the summer? At the summer's
end, Baker published a column in the Southern Patriot in response to
that allegation. While she had feared for the lives of all young civil rights
workers, she had hoped that Freedom Summer would enhance and
transform their lives. So, it was not just a matter of what the volunteers
could do for the movement, but also of what the movement might offer
them. “We wanted their coming to mean something creative for each of
them personally as well as for the movement,” Baker wrote.83 As
always, Baker had faith in people's capacities to learn from the situations
in which they placed themselves and from the people with whom they
undertook to struggle for justice.
For the duration of the summer, Ella Baker played her customary dual
role as logistical coordinator and movement philosopher. She helped
with such details as funding, housing, and publicity, as well as with
finding community contacts for project staffers and volunteers. But her
most significant contribution was ideological. Baker wanted to make
sure that the core leadership of the project, who would be working within
the COFO coalition, had a clarity of purpose and a firm consensus about
their politics and priorities for the summer. One priority she emphasized
throughout was the need for an agenda and a curriculum for liberatory
education.
FREEDOM SCHOOLS
One of the most visible outcomes of the summer's efforts was the
establishment of over fifty Freedom Schools involving hundreds of
students and volunteer teachers throughout the state.84 The first
experiment with an alternative classroom as a site for political organizing
and popular education was undertaken during SNCC'S first few months in
McComb, after dozens of students were suspended from public school
for their political activity. During Freedom Summer, a more ambitious
plan was put in place to link political and practical education to
community organizing in Mississippi. Ella Baker drew on her work with
the Worker's Education Project in the 1930s to advise the architects of
McComb's Nonviolent High School and the subsequent Freedom
Schools modeled after it. The Freedom Schools were a welcome
supplement to black education in Mississippi, which was in a desperately
impoverished condition because the state government spent nearly four
times as much money per year on white students as it did on black
ones.85
In 1964, Charlie Cobb, a student from Howard University and a
talented young writer, was the prime mover behind the Freedom School
idea, later aided by Bob Moses, Freedom School director Staughton
Lynd, a phalanx of volunteers, and a crop of eager students, mostly
adolescents and teenagers.86 Ella Baker's influence in this project, as was
the case with most other SNCC efforts, was subtle but palpable. When she
taught New York workers about consumer issues, labor laws, and
African history during the Great Depression, she did so as a way to both
bolster their literacy and to embolden them politically. Similarly, when
SNCC set up Freedom Schools, the teacher-organizers fashioned a
learning environment and method of instruction consistent with their
evolving political and philosophical beliefs. Rigid hierarchy was
abandoned, and the curriculum was designed to reflect the world and
heritage of the schools' students.87 These were different kinds of
classrooms than the Mississippi students had previously encountered.
Nonviolent High and the Freedom Schools that followed were the first
manifestations of a type of “free space” within the movement for
creative and intellectual work.
Coordinated by Staughton Lynd, a white history professor at
Spelman, the first schools opened on July 4, 1964. Lynd ran off the
outline on an old hectograph machine, loaded the copies in the trunk of
his car, and delivered them to the Freedom Summer orientation in
Oxford, Ohio, in June. According to Lynd, the curriculum was not a
blueprint for the inexperienced young teacher-organizers but “a security
blanket,” of potential help in case they ran out of things to do.88 Lynd
neither met nor conferred with Ella Baker about how to run the schools.
He did not even recall her presence at the New York meeting funded by
the National Council of Churches that mapped out the logistics for the
schools, but her influence was pervasive and undeniable. The orientation
at Oxford, the informal instructions that were given to summer
volunteers (some of whom were teachers by profession), and the
curriculum itself bore a striking resemblance to everything Baker
modeled and advocated with regard to education.
It was almost poetic that radical education had assumed center stage
in a movement inspired by the reluctant but relentless teacher Ella Baker.
The establishment of the Freedom Schools was an amazing
accomplishment. Literacy and an understanding of the Constitution were
necessary for black citizens to pass the qualifying test enabling them to
vote; so there were practical goals similar to those of the Citizenship
Schools, but the Freedom Schools went well beyond the basics. Indeed,
they embraced a radical pedagogy and a radical philosophy that were an
extension of Baker's teaching style and method, which had been
reinforced and popularized through her interactions with SNCC activists
every day for four years. Tom Wahman, a twenty-six-year-old teacher
from New York, described his understanding of the goals of the Freedom
Schools as follows: “We want to bring the student to a point where he
questions everything he reads or is taught—the printed word, movies, the
‘power structure’—everything.” Teachers hoped to encourage students to
be more literate and knowledgeable and to apply those intellectual skills
to the black freedom struggle.89
When the curriculum and structure were still in the planning stages,
Baker was called in to help shape the content and philosophy of the
project. A SNCC supporter, Lois Chaffee, helped coordinate a major
conference on Freedom Schools in March 1964 and invited veteran
activists and educators like Baker and Septima Clark to attend and give
guidance. When Baker accepted the invitation, Chaffee wrote to her to
say that the organizers of the conference were “ecstatic”: “We really do
want your stamp on the stuff we tell those kids this summer.”90 Ella
Baker served as “chairman” at the conference held at the union hall of
District 65, located at Astor Place in Greenwich Village, and funded by
the National Conference of Churches. The meeting helped lay the
groundwork for the Freedom Schools.91 Baker also consulted with Bob
Moses and John O'Neal, a COFO staffer, about the screening and
recruitment of prospective teachers.92 During an all-day conference at
Tougaloo College on April 25, Baker met with the summer school
administrative committee.93 The schools were designed as much to build
youthful leadership for the movement as they were to facilitate the
acquisition and sharing of knowledge.94 In the Freedom School
curriculum, self-knowledge, applied knowledge, and critical thinking
were all strongly emphasized as essential components of a participatory
democratic process. Although the Freedom School project had a clear
approach and definite curriculum, Lynd emphasized that each teacher
and class had a great deal of autonomy in deciding what worked best for
them. This was an extension of the decentralized structure of SNCC
itself.95 The freedom schools were sites for creative teaching and
learning. Judy Richardson, a black New Yorker from working-class roots
who had attended Swarthmore College, was impressed with the use of
haiku poetry as one of the many innovative teaching devices employed
in the schools.96
Ella Baker's influence was evident in each Freedom School
classroom. When SNCC'S core leadership talked about teaching and
learning within the context of the Black Freedom Movement, they talked
about Ella Baker. “She was a consummate teacher,” one SNCC member
recalled, “never pounding us, ‘You must do this, you must do that,’ [but
simply] by raising questions.”97 So, what are we trying to accomplish?
she would probe. Are we all in agreement? What do we really mean by
that? These were her kind of questions. Her method of inquiry often
helped anchor or center an unwieldy conversation. Another SNCC activist
made similar observations: “Miss Ella would ask key questions, and
through the asking of the questions, certain things became revealed.”98
Ella Baker's approach to teaching and learning was the governing ethos
of the Freedom School experiment.
Baker's pedagogical style paralleled that of her contemporary, Paulo
Freire, the radical Brazilian educator. Three key tenets of Freire's
educational philosophy can be found in Baker's practice and in the
Freedom Schools themselves. The first is the notion that “to teach is not
to transfer knowledge but to create the possibility for the production or
construction of knowledge.”99 The second is the idea that teaching and
learning should be reciprocal; it would be a contradiction for a teacher
who believed in “democracy and freedom” to “at the same time act with
arrogance” and be unwilling to listen across boundaries of difference.100
The final perspective that Freire and Baker shared, one that was manifest
in the practices and philosophy of SNCC'S Freedom Schools, is skepticism
about the conservative impact of traditional ways of teaching and a
conviction that a more democratic learning environment has a liberatory
potential. Baker had long complained about black female teachers having
their freedom of expression “curbed.” Freire criticized “the reductionist
mentality that talks only of training skills” meant to strengthen “the
authoritarian manner of speaking from the top down. In such a situation
speaking with, which is part and parcel of any democratic vision of the
world, is absent, replaced by the more authoritarian form: speaking
‘to.’”101 These were Baker's sentiments about education as well. Forging
an arena for democratic learning and teaching was a critical component
of Baker's revolutionary vision of individual, institutional, and societal
change.102
The final significant feature of the Freedom Schools was the type of
student that they targeted. Everyone was welcome, but in their
orientation the Freedom School teachers were told to expect the children
of SNCC'S main constituency, the southern black poor. In an analytical
article about the impact of the Freedom Schools written for Southern
Exposure in 1965, author and attorney Len Holt wrote: “The teachers-tobe had been told that most of their students would be from the ‘block,’
the ‘outs’ who were not part of the middle class of Mississippi.” He
added, “The purpose of the Freedom Schools is to help them begin to
question.”103
In a memo to SNCC'S executive committee in January 1964, Charlie
Cobb made a strong case for Freedom Schools as a critical component of
SNCC'S work over the summer. First of all, he indicted Mississippi's
schools and then laid out the importance of education as a battlefield of
struggle. “Mississippi's impoverished educational system is also
burdened with virtually a complete absence of academic freedom, and
students are forced to live in an environment that is geared to squash
intellectual curiosity and different thinking.” He concluded that “[t]he
state of Mississippi destroys ‘smart niggers’ and its classrooms remain
intellectual wastelands.” The challenge facing SNCC and COFO then was to
invigorate the intellectual lives of young black Mississippians, to “fill an
intellectual and creative vacuum … and get them to articulate their own
desires, demands and questions.”104 The next challenge was to help them
to act on those desires and demands.
11 THE MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM
DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE
RADICAL CAMPAIGNS OF THE
1960S AND 1970S
What Ella Baker did for us, we did for the people of Mississippi.
Bob Moses, 1996
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) came into being on
April 26, 1964, at a rally of 200 people in the state capital of Jackson. It
represented in its humble birth a truly democratic alternative to the
whites-only state Democratic Party, and it had a brief moment on the
national political stage at the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic
City, New Jersey, in August 1964. The formation of the MFDP was the
successful culmination of four years of life-altering, heart-wrenching,
awe-inspiring organizing by a determined little band of freedom soldiers
advancing county by county throughout the state. Its success was not
determined by what would be won at the convention but rather by what
had already been achieved by virtue of the delegation's arrival there. The
bus and car caravans began to roll into Atlantic City early on the
morning of August 21. Some had driven all the way from Jackson; others
from different parts of the South and North. Ella Baker had arranged the
logistics and planned for delegates to stay at a hotel called the Gem. And
a gem it was not, but the rooms there were all Baker could squeeze out of
the MFDP's meager budget. Aaron Henry, the leader of the delegation,
complained about “the worst accommodations imaginable.”1 However,
what MFDP delegates lacked in resources and physical conveniences, they
made up for with their righteous determination.
Ella Baker navigated the treacherous, yet familiar waters of national
politics with a fierce resolve that made it possible for grassroots activists
such as Fannie Lou Hamer to elude politicians' attempts to silence them
and speak to a national audience about the oppression they suffered and
their hopes for American democracy. The pivotal events of August 1964
not only transformed the national context for the civil rights movement
but also reshaped SNCC'S political perspective, strategic approach, and
evolving identity. Two objectives guided MFDP: affirming black selfdetermination and challenging northern-based white allies to take a
stronger stance in support of the southern-based movement. For some,
like Ella Baker, it was a calculated political gamble. It would either win a
tactical victory, providing Mississippi activists with another tool with
which to push for full freedom, or it would expose the limitations of
mainstream party politics and strengthen the resolve of those same
activists to find creative and truly democratic methods to realize radical
social change.
Mississippi blacks were excluded from participation in Democratic
Party precinct meetings—the first phase of the delegate selection process
— through a variety of extralegal means: economic threats, physical
intimidation, and chicanery. The MFDP delegates and their supporters
documented this process of systematic exclusion and moved on to form
their own alternative delegate selection process and state party. The MFDP
was a grassroots independent initiative, but the goal was to operate
sufficiently within Democratic Party rules to be able to demand
recognition at the Democratic National Convention.
Freedom Summer volunteers and SNCC and COFO staff circulated
literature and canvassed rural and urban communities throughout the
state to urge Mississippians to participate in the alternative process of
electing their own freedom delegates to go to the Democratic National
Convention and hold up two Mississippi alternatives to the nation; one
racist and backward-looking, the other democratic and forward-looking.
Many activists had decided that black political exclusion was the
linchpin holding the entire southern system together. Once that was
broken, other possibilities would be created, and black Mississippians
would be a force to be reckoned with. Baker was not at all convinced of
this, but she thought that any militant mobilization that bolstered local
nonelite leadership was a good thing; so she was prepared to support it
with all the energy she could muster. The MFDP was another attempt by
SNCC to give some of the most oppressed sectors of the black community
something of their own, an independent political organization run for and
by Mississippi blacks. Once this new political tool was firmly in hand,
the idea was that it could be used to extract concessions from northern
liberals, to confront them in the most direct way possible to acknowledge
the legitimacy of the grievances and claims of Mississippi blacks, and to
rally and mobilize the collective strength of black Mississippians.
Northern liberal Democrats had taken a hands-off policy while
professing support in principle for black political rights. The idea of
forming an alternative Democratic Party in the state that was based on
inclusion rather than exclusion was designed to force the hand of
northern liberals and simultaneously empower local blacks and their
allies.
While young SNCC field secretaries donned overalls and boots and
traveled the back roads of the state to drum up support, Baker put on her
respectable gray suit and knocked on the doors of Congress, labor
organizations, and civil rights groups to make sure MFDP delegates had
the support they needed when they arrived in Atlantic City. Ella Baker
was still on the payroll of SCEF, but Jim Dombrowski and the Bradens
shared her assessment about the importance of the MFDP campaign; so
the focus of her activity from the summer through the fall of 1964 was
the MFDP. She agreed to act as director of the MFDP's Washington, D.C.,
office. Because the fledgling party had such meager funds, it could not
have afforded to pay a full-time staff person, which made Baker's
volunteer services all the more welcome.2
Much of the struggle to guarantee that the MFDP got a hearing at the
Atlantic City convention occurred over the five-month period between
the founding conference in April and the national convention in August.
The MFDP was founded against the backdrop of African nations declaring
their independence from European colonialism. Similarly, black
Mississippians declared their independence from the prosegregationist
state Democratic Party, which of course they had never really been a part
of, and invited any whites bold enough to break ranks to join with them.
Few did. But the MFDP was not simply trying to make a symbolic gesture;
it wanted to test the resolve of northern Democrats, to have them make
good on their promise of inclusion, and ultimately to obtain the power to
elect politicians more responsive to their needs. The Democratic Party's
convention in Atlantic City would become the place where the gauntlet
would be thrown down. The MFDP would demand that the all-white
delegation, the state party's so-called regulars, be ousted in favor of a
“freedom” delegation.
Baker, the SNCC activists, and the members of the MFDP knew that this
was not an effort they could undertake without allies. The new faction
had to persuade enough delegates to support them if the issue was going
to make it to the convention floor. In March 1964, even before the MFDP's
founding convention, Ella Baker and Bob Moses attended the United
Auto Workers convention, also in Atlantic City, and met at length with
Joseph Rauh, a UAW lawyer who was a leading member of Americans for
Democratic Action, a liberal organization. Rauh was eager to get
involved in the MFDP campaign, after having talked with Moses earlier
that year.3 Also present was Mildred Jeffrey, a Democratic national
committeewoman from Michigan and the mother of a Freedom Summer
volunteer. Moses and Baker laid out a convincing case, and Rauh and
Jeffrey were on board. On May 20, Moses and Baker went to
Washington to again rally support. At a conference that had just ended,
the Americans for Democratic Action had passed a resolution supporting
the MFDP. Rauh recalls having another meeting with Moses and Baker in
a Washington, D.C., park, where they discussed at length various
contingencies related to the challenge.4 Rauh agreed to serve as the
MFDP's official legal counsel. Ella Baker then went over to the leftleaning Institute for Policy Studies and solicited white lawyer Bill Higgs
to serve as another legal adviser to the campaign. He agreed.5
At the outset, and in principle, all the major civil rights leaders and
most left-leaning liberals were behind the challenge. But how far would
SNCC and the Mississippi delegates be willing to push the issue? What
victory meant for them and what victory meant for many of their more
moderate supporters was ultimately quite different. In preparing for the
convention, SNCC and the MFDP had to chart a rugged political terrain to
figure out who could be trusted and who could not. Baker helped them
steer the course. For example, when Wiley Branton called a “Meeting of
the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership for May 14 [1964] in
Atlanta,” SNCC staff feared that Branton's group would dilute their plans
to orchestrate some type of direct action in Atlantic City; and Baker
advised that “it would be important for the militant elements” to meet
before the larger Branton meeting in order “to resist the pressure” to
conform to a type of “unity” that would compromise SNCC and the MFDP's
own agenda.6
In the final analysis, what appeared to be SNCC'S and the MFDP's plea
for inclusion into mainstream politics actually became the watershed that
signaled SNCC'S departure from the liberal fold toward much more radical
directions. As a grassroots organizing strategy, the MFDP was a real
success. It politicized many poor black Mississippians, developed new
grassroots leaders, and even brought the dire situation of black people in
the state to national attention. But the MFDP delegation's experience at the
Atlantic City convention was frustrating. Because considerations of
partisan politics outweighed those of justice and democracy, even the
leaders of national civil rights organizations defected from the MFDP's
cause. Ella Baker was not surprised to discover that politicians and the
civil rights leaders who looked to them to produce change were reluctant
to embrace a grassroots organization when it took an uncompromising
stance.
Over the course of the spring and summer, thousands of people joined
the MFDP. They were overwhelmingly black. While some of the official
party leaders were men, the most visible, vocal, and influential leaders
were women: Fannie Lou Hamer, the impoverished sharecropper from
Ruleville, Mississippi, who had participated in Freedom Vote and who
spoke powerfully about her life in struggle; Annie Devine, a one-time
schoolteacher, insurance agent, and core organizer from Canton,
Mississippi; and Victoria Gray, a young mother of three who ran a small
cosmetics business in Hattiesburg and resented the middle-class leaders
of the local NAACP because they functioned as a “closed social group.”7
The gender composition and dynamics of the MFDP reflected the
characteristics of the grassroots movement of the 1950s and 1960s rather
than the male domination that prevailed within more hierarchical
organizations. In his book on the movement in Mississippi, Charles
Payne asserts that by the early 1960s civil rights activity was defined by
a “higher participation of women,” in contrast to an earlier period when
men, many of them World War II veterans, dominated the movement in
the state.8
Southern black communities were emboldened and empowered as a
result of the MFDP mobilization. The stranglehold of fear had been
loosened, and the silence had been broken. And once the world saw the
ugly reality of Mississippi's racism, some participants believed, it would
be unable simply to look the other way. At least in part, they were right.
Throughout the summer of 1964, Freedom Summer volunteers and
SNCC/COFO volunteers and staff went door to door in small towns and
cities throughout the state spreading the gospel about the MFDP and
documenting instances of black voter intimidation and outright
obstruction. They were joined by local young people who had been
angry and dissatisfied with their lot long before the SNCC and COFO
organizers arrived and were happy to finally have allies, resources, and a
clear outlet for their pent-up political energies.9 Young Mississippians
like Sam Block, Willie Peacock, Curtis Hayes, Hollis Watkins, June
Johnson, and Dorie and Joyce Ladner were among them.
When the MFDP held its nominating convention on August 6 in
Jackson to select sixty-eight delegates to travel to Atlantic City as
representatives of the party, Baker was once again asked to deliver the
keynote address. This speech was different. Only two days before, the
risks that the struggle for justice entailed had been dramatically revealed
by the discovery of the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been
brutally murdered, and their mangled bodies had been buried in a dam
near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Ella Baker stood before the grief-stricken
crowd of 800 that had gathered in Jackson's Masonic Hall on that hot
summer night and delivered a political message full of anger and
determination. Sensitive to the agony that the families of the victims
must have felt at that moment, Baker was both mournful and militant as
she eulogized the three young men, and she urged movement activists to
carry on where their three brave young comrades had left off. At the
same time, she underscored the lesser value that white society placed on
black lives: “Until the killing of black mothers' sons is as important as
the killing of white mothers' sons, we who believe in freedom cannot
rest.”10 And Baker did not rest. From speech making in Mississippi
churches and meeting halls to lobbying in Congressional offices, she
gave her all to the MFDP campaign.
As director of the Washington, D.C., office of the party, Baker played
an important role in coordinating the MFDP's national political strategy
and in anchoring its northern-based lobbying effort. Building on the
groundwork she and Moses had laid through their spring outreach visits,
Baker rallied liberal allies to pledge support for the Freedom Democrats.
A white male, Walter Tillow, and a black female, Barbara Jones
(Omolade), both New Yorkers and both nineteen years old, were
assigned to assist her. They received an apprenticeship like no other.
Baker did not relocate to Washington, but she oversaw the business of
the office through routine visits and lengthy phone communications.
Tillow recalls: “She would take the train from New York and take a cab
over to the office. No one went to pick her up. We wouldn't do anything
big or do any written stuff without talking to her on the phone… . We
talked to her a lot on the phone to check with her. Money matters we had
to discuss with her. We were supposed to be funded by COFO, but in
essence we were funded by SNCC. To rent something, etc., we called her
up at her apartment and she would contact Moses or Forman. Even news
releases were discussed with Ms. Baker. She played a big role even
though she wasn't there each day.”11 Later, after the Atlantic City
convention, Lawrence Guyot and Michael Thelwell, who were more
seasoned but only slightly older than Jones and Tillow, came on board to
coordinate the next phase of the MFDP's challenge, but for much of the
summer of 1964 Baker, Tillow, and Jones handled the work to be done in
Washington.
Even after she accepted the post as director of the MFDP's Washington
office, Baker continued to harbor serious doubts about exactly what the
MFDP contingent could manage to accomplish at the convention, and she
certainly never expected an all-out victory. Yet she acted as if she were at
least guardedly optimistic as plans for Atlantic City moved forward. She
hoped for an experience that would mature and radicalize the MFDP's
young supporters and give activists from Mississippi a glimpse of the
national political stage and their ability to wield some influence on it. So,
with these broader goals in mind and her doubts tucked away, Ella Baker
worked tirelessly to mobilize support. She called in some favors, utilized
contacts with labor and civic leaders who had political clout, and
deployed her media connections. She orchestrated mailings to
sympathetic delegates, made extensive phone calls, and arranged
personal meetings to lobby Democratic Party leaders face to face. Tillow
and Jones were in awe of the finesse and savvy Baker exhibited in
running the office. She was just as comfortable talking with a senator or
a congressman as she was with one of the local activists from
Mississippi.12
The naive young Walter Tillow remembered being dragged along to a
meeting Baker had with Harlem's congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, a
longtime associate whom she knew to be more interested in his own
career and notoriety than in the democratic principles that SNCC and the
MFDP represented. After Powell praised Baker, embraced her, and
pledged his loyalty, she quietly told Tillow as they left the meeting, “He's
not going to do a thing.” The point of the meeting, Tillow later surmised,
was to neutralize Powell and make sure he did not oppose the effort—
and to demystify the presumed omnipotence of big-shot politicians for a
young organizer like Tillow.13
A POLITICAL GAMBLE IN ATLANTIC
CITY
When the weary but determined delegation of Mississippi farmers,
beauticians, schoolteachers, and one pharmacist arrived in New Jersey in
late August, the outcome of their long, arduous journey was still unclear.
Baker had worked long and hard to mobilize support within the
Democratic Party's left wing. At least ten state delegations seemed to be
on board, and a handful of individuals were resolute advocates, including
Edith Greene, a women's rights advocate and strong supporter of the
MFDP, whose ideas would take a sharp turn to the right after the
convention.14 The UAW and Americans for Democratic Action had
officially endorsed the MFDP delegates, as had Martin Luther King, A.
Philip Randolph, and the NAACP. So, on the eve of the convention, many
of the Mississippi activists were hopeful.
Two weeks after President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act
on July 2, an act Baker saw as too little too late, Baker and Fannie Lou
Hamer went on a three-week campaign tour punctuated by rallies, press
conferences, and meetings with prospective supporters and donors. They
stopped in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Cambridge, and Philadelphia
and ended up in New York City on August 5 before heading back to
Jackson for the nominating convention.15 On July 20, Baker sent out a
memo to MFDP supporters tying the importance of what was about to take
place in Atlantic City to the presumed murder of the three young civil
rights workers (which would be confirmed two weeks later): “Three
mothers' sons who sought to secure political democracy for the people of
Mississippi probably lie buried beneath the murky swamps near
Philadelphia, a small town in that state. If they have paid with their lives
for believing in the right of the governed to have a voice in the election
of those who govern them, all Democrats who can register and vote with
freedom are now challenged as never before.”16 The three young men
who had come to symbolize the hope of the summer—that good would
win out over evil, that hard work would be rewarded with their safe
return, that even the brutality of Mississippi racists had its limits—were
gone. With large photographs and posters of the three held high, the
Mississippians heading off to Atlantic City were all the more determined
to make sure the young men had not died in vain.
The first confrontation after they arrived in New Jersey was with the
credentials committee of the national convention. Fannie Lou Hamer, the
vice chairperson of the MFDP delegation, made an impassioned plea for
recognition. All she had to do to make a compelling case against the
blatant oppression and disenfranchisement of Mississippi blacks was to
tell her own story. She had been threatened, evicted, and beaten by local
police for daring to assert her rights as an American citizen. How could
northern liberals who professed their commitment to equality and
democracy ignore Hamer's ordeal or fail to recognize the challenge it
represented for the Democratic Party? But President Johnson was so
fearful that Hamer's remarks would upset his electoral ambitions that he
called an emergency press conference just as her speech was going to be
aired on network television to deflect attention away from the MFDP's
most powerful spokesperson.
Protests outside the convention demanding the Democratic leadership
take a stand, coupled with the unbending resolve of the Freedom
delegates to be seated at the convention, created a series of crises for
Johnson and his supporters. They did not want to give any political
ammunition to the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, by having
disruptions or defections in Atlantic City, nor did they want to appear to
be callously insensitive to the compelling grievances of black
Mississippians. White liberals such as Allard Lowenstein and Joe Rauh,
who operated a bit more on the fringes of the Democratic Party
mainstream, also faced a crisis. They wanted to please the Mississippi
civil rights activists, with whom they had allied themselves going into
the convention, but they wanted to do so without alienating the top
leadership of the Democratic Party. The crisis spilled over to highranking black leaders, such as King, Wilkins, and Rustin. Northern black
elected officials and civil rights leaders in attendance at the convention
were lobbied hard by supporters of Hubert Humphrey, the aspiring vice
presidential nominee, to try to avert a scene; and not wanting to alienate
the man who was likely to be vice president, they did.
Much of the drama in Atlantic City was played out behind closed
doors. There were numerous late-night strategy sessions in Martin Luther
King's hotel suite, in the MFDP's makeshift office, and in the corridors of
the convention hall. There were also impromptu vigils and the singing of
freedom songs outside the hall. The top Democratic Party leadership
sought, above all, to avoid bad publicity and a messy fight on the
convention floor. Humphrey, aided by Walter Mondale and a coterie of
aides, pushed for some type of compromise short of an all-out
concession. The right-wing position at the convention was summed up
by Texas governor John Connally, who blurted out in one discussion that
he'd walk out if the MFDP “baboons” were seated. In the face of such
racist opposition, MFDP sympathizers groped for a solution.17
Congresswoman Edith Greene proposed one compromise, which would
have likely resulted in seating nearly the entire MFDP delegation, but this
proposal somehow got lost in the shuffle. The compromise offer that
emerged was that the MFDP would be given two symbolic seats on the
convention floor alongside the regular all-white delegation. “We didn't
come all this way for no two seats,” replied an insulted and adamant
Fannie Lou Hamer.18
A series of confusing and overlapping meetings with a shifting list of
participants resulted in the erroneous public perception, fueled by
comments made by Joe Rauh, that the MFDP's representatives had
accepted the compromise, which put at least two factions within the
MFDP coalition sharply at odds. When news of the deal was aired, many
of the MFDP delegates, who had not even had a chance to discuss—let
alone vote on— the proposal, were outraged. Issues of process melded
with debates about the merits of the compromise itself. Through
maneuvering and wrangling that no one owned up to after the fact, a
“deal” was announced before a full debate and deliberations could occur
among the delegates. This put the Freedom Democratic contingent in the
awkward position of either going along with a deal that had not actually
been negotiated or publicly rejecting it and alienating some of their
friends. Baker's old friend Bayard Rustin was a strong proponent of the
compromise, insisting that it was a strategic step forward. Baker
remained wholly unconvinced. This was not the first time she had
principled differences with a friend; still, this was a heartfelt issue, and
there must have been some disappointment in Rustin on Baker's part.
Rustin's biographer, Jervis Anderson, describes this moment as a
watershed in Rustin's career.19 His defection cost him the respect of the
young SNCC activists, some of whom he had developed close ties with
over the years. Ever the democrat with a small “d,” Baker was more
concerned about the closed character of the decision-making process
than about the backsliding of individuals, even those she respected. She
was furious at how the so-called decision had been made and at the
presumptuousness of those who tried to persuade the MFDP delegates to
go along with it after the fact.
When it was announced that a compromise had been reached, Baker
was in a meeting with the Nebraska delegation, lobbying hard to
persuade its sympathetic members to support the MFDP's request to be
seated as a group. She was suspicious as the discussion dragged on “that
the man who was in charge of the meeting apparently had been alerted to
stall until he got some feedback” from another delegate, who Baker
realized was governor of the state. When the chairperson interrupted the
discussion to make an announcement, Baker “could tell what had taken
place.” After the compromise was announced, some expected that Baker
would bow out gracefully as the chair attempted to end the meeting and
declare the issue resolved. They did not know her very well if they did.
Baker had no intention of complying. “[H]e acknowledged my presence
with the hope that I wouldn't have anything to say. Of course I took the
position that the great loss was that of the people who were at the
Convention, who had no opportunity to participate in any decision
making.”20 Baker was angry and disappointed but not wholly surprised.
She had seen political chicanery before, but her a priori doubts about
partisan politics did not mute her anger at the final outcome.
In one of the private sessions after the compromise was broadcast as a
done deal, Joe Rauh, who claimed to have been misled and misquoted in
the original announcement to the press, pleaded with MFDP delegates to
support the decision anyway, forgive any insults or injuries that might
have been inflicted, and seize the opportunity to make an ally out of
Hubert Humphrey. Baker cringed at the duplicitous nature of his appeal,
which called on black people's “demonstrated … capacity for
forgiveness and understanding.” A fuming Ella Baker replied with a
sharp impatience uncharacteristic of her usual manner of speech, “to call
upon us to be understanding of Mr. Humphrey's desire to win, was
saying, forget your need, your winning, and support his winning.”21
Baker resented this attempt to manipulate the good will of the delegates
and persuade them that someone else's interests were more important
than their own. This was the ultimate insult in her opinion. Baker gave
Rauh a tongue-lashing that he would never forget. He had made some
remarks to the delegates and received polite applause until Baker spoke
and the tone of the meeting shifted. “I don't care about traitors like
Humphrey,” Baker thundered, and then she turned her wrath directly at
Rauh. “She just cut me to ribbons,” he recalled a few years later, partly
offended by the attack but partly impressed by its skillfulness. “If you're
going to get it,” he remarked, “might as well get it from an expert … and
I got it from an expert. She just cut me up.”22 Baker viewed Rauh as a
power broker attempting to use his knowledge and savvy to coerce
inexperienced and idealistic activists into following a political course
that was not in their best interest. She found this intolerable, and she was
not afraid to say so. Baker made a point of publicly criticizing Rauh
because she wanted to make it clear that while she had recruited him to
serve as counsel to the MFDP, the partnership was not unconditional.
Another white liberal of dubious motives was Allard Lowenstein,
who, after an extended absence from the movement, resurfaced during
the Atlantic City convention. Baker was wary of Lowenstein from the
start of his involvement in the movement, and the animus between them
grew stronger over the years. Much of their antagonism was political, but
some of it was attributable to their very different personalities.
Lowenstein's overt arrogance, his sense of self-importance as a white
person in a predominately black struggle, rubbed Ella Baker the wrong
way. He was too impatient, too pragmatic, too eager to place himself at
the center of activity and unwilling to wade through the tedious process
of democratic decision making that Baker viewed as absolutely essential.
Contrasting SNCC'S model of organizing with Lowenstein's, biographer
Bill Chafe wrote that Lowenstein's “elevated hierarchy and decisiveness;
the other [SNCC'S] promoted egalitarianism and tolerated ambiguity.”23
Lowenstein recognized and deplored the vast extent of Baker's
influence in SNCC. He saw her as allied with the more radical forces
within the larger movement and believed she was the most effective and
persistent force in pulling SNCC to the left, which disturbed him greatly.
Conversely, Baker was critical of the liberalism that Lowenstein so
openly embraced.24 For Lowenstein, organizing was necessary to make
the existing system work for everyone. For Baker, systemic change was
necessary. She was as skeptical of career politicians and civilian elites as
Lowenstein himself seemed leery of the masses. Much of Baker and
Lowenstein's political sparring occurred indirectly. He pushed for a
closer alliance with Democratic Party politicians, while she pulled for
closer ties to the masses and their radical supporters. Competing
worldviews clashed in Atlantic City: a pragmatic liberalism that placed
faith in the Democratic politicians versus a principled radical vision that
saw a circuitous long-term process of movement building as the
salvation for the oppressed.
So, what was the MFDP to do? A handful of the delegates initially
wanted to accept the compromise. The two official leaders of the
delegation, Aaron Henry and Ed King, even argued its merits. And some
of those who had been allies throughout the campaign were also advising
moderation, compromise, and cooperation with the Democratic Party,
even though establishment party leaders were unwilling to fully support
the MFDP. It was the practical thing to do, urged King, Rustin, Wilkins,
and Rauh. But the majority of activists who had trekked to Atlantic City
on their own political pilgrimage were in no mood to compromise. In an
all-night meeting at a local church, speaker after speaker pleaded with
the MFDP delegates to be reasonable, to think strategically, to remember
who their friends were. Baker said nothing. Her sentiments had already
been expressed and were no secret. After the speech making, the
delegates met alone to confer and opted to reject the compromise. Later
that night, there was a vigil on the boardwalk where the group sang
freedom songs; some cried, and others expressed anger and disbelief at
what had happened—all against the backdrop of three haunting images,
those of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. The next day, the MFDP again
captured media attention and disrupted the convention by forcibly
occupying a row of seats with false credentials given to them by
sympathetic delegates from other states. They had no intention of
retreating quietly.25
The showdown in Atlantic City was a turning point in the movement.
Many hopes had been riding on the outcome of the convention. Those
hopes had been dashed. Time, energy, dollars, and lives had been
invested to obtain this small slice of freedom. Many MFDP activists went
away from the 1964 convention feeling cheated and betrayed. Baker had
been less optimistic at the outset; so she was less disappointed in the end.
She did not view the MFDP campaign as a defeat. Rather, she saw it as a
“testing force” and an “alerting process.” It had not wrested political
power from the hands of the Democratic Party elites, but it had
successfully mobilized a solid core of Mississippi activists. The
experience had provided a set of political lessons for organizers, as she
hoped it would, lessons that could not have been obtained from any
book, lecture, or workshop. In Baker's mind, the MFDP experiment had
“settled any debate” about “the possibility of functioning through the
mainstream of the Democratic Party.”26 It also stiffened the resolve and
determination of those who were not wholly alienated and disheartened
to fight harder and to fight for more radical kinds of changes.
Shortly after the ordeal in Atlantic City, SNCC members gathered in
October at the Gammon Seminary in Atlanta and the following month at
Gulfside Church in Waveland, Mississippi, to map out what they would
do next. Disappointed at the way things had unfolded in New Jersey and
confused about who were and were not reliable allies, SNCC pondered its
future. At the Gammon meeting, Ella Baker tried to negotiate with both
sides of the growing rift between those who wanted SNCC to become a
more disciplined organization (Forman) and those who wanted it to
remain loose, informal, and familial (Moses). These two factions
eventually referred to one another as the hard-liners and the floaters,
respectively. In the meeting, Baker supported the idea that more power
should be given to local people, as Moses did, but still felt that veteran
SNCC organizers had a role to play and that more accountability was
needed. She urged SNCC to consolidate, evaluate, and clarify its existing
problems before it ambitiously took on new projects. She was trying to
anchor the group as it grew, expanded its mission, and grappled with
internal tensions and external attacks and criticisms.27
At the Waveland retreat, which Baker did not attend, fundamental
questions were put on the table in over thirty position papers. The group
debated issues of race, class, ideology, structure, and strategy. Some
questioned again whether whites should play as major a role as they had
in Freedom Summer. Since over seventy volunteers, most of them white,
had requested to stay on and work with SNCC after the summer, the
implications were considerable. Forman proposed a tighter structure and
more discipline for the organization, while others complained that the
spontaneous and decentralized character of SNCC would be lost.
A paper on sexism in SNCC emerged from a workshop on women's
concerns. Crafted largely by two white women, Casey Hayden, a staff
member in the Jackson office, and Mary King, who worked closely with
Julian Bond on communications in Atlanta, the paper compared the
treatment of women in the movement with the condition of blacks in the
society. Those who might have been receptive at another moment were
not terribly receptive then, when the organization was facing what they
viewed as more pressing crises. It was also a time of heightened tensions
about the growing number of whites in SNCC; since the paper originated
from two white women, it was more readily dismissed by blacks in the
organization, men and women, who felt it did not represent their gender
experiences in SNCC. Many issues were aired at Waveland, but few were
resolved.28
Overwhelmed and frustrated by the magnitude of the work, the
decisions that had to be made, and the internal rifts that were brewing
within the once harmonious family of freedom fighters, some SNCC
veterans pulled back from the movement. Sherrod went back to school;
Forman took a brief medical leave; and in December Moses dropped out
and eventually traveled to Tanzania, where he lived for several years. For
those who remained, there were enormous organizational challenges to
overcome.
The year after the confrontation in Atlantic City SNCC took
increasingly militant positions and came under increasingly bitter attacks
from the media and mainstream politicians. Immediately after the
Democratic Party convention, the NAACP held a meeting of liberal forces
in New York at which Gloster Current attacked SNCC and its emphasis on
grassroots democracy, as did Allard Lowenstein. Rustin would later
concur, arguing that one of SNCC'S problems was that it believed it could
win a struggle relying solely on poor people. The principal targets of the
attacks were those whom the fbi, liberals, and conservatives saw as
radicalizing influences and, for very different reasons, wanted to
undermine. Bob Moses was denounced as a draft dodger by Mississippi
senator James Eastland because of his conscientious objector status in
opposition to the war in Vietnam.29 And Ella Baker was singled out for
ruthless attack by conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert
Novak in the New York Herald Tribune from September 3, 1964 to April
9, 1965.30 The columnists excoriated SNCC as communist-dominated and
raked Ella Baker over the coals as one of the “unquestioned leaders” of
the MFDP, saying that her involvement was “cause … for concern.”31 One
of Baker's allegedly sinister acts was her effort, according to Evans and
Novak, to link the MFDP to SCEF and the Highlander Folk School.
Another of their columns linked Baker and the MFDP to the National
Guardian (a left-wing publication), the National Lawyers Guild (a
radical association of lawyers and legal professionals), and leftist trade
unions, such as the United Electrical Workers (to which Russell Nixon,
general manager of the Guardian was formerly affiliated). When Baker
addressed the annual convention of the United Electrical Workers in
September 1964, calling for a greater alliance between the civil rights
and labor movements, Evans and Novak characterized her as a “veteran
leftist.”32 Conservative criticism was to be expected, but as Baker
became more openly allied with the left wing of the movement,
supporting SNCC even as it became more militant and agreeing to work
for the HUAC-labeled subversives in SCEF, liberals also attacked her.33
COMING TO GRIPS WITH BLACK POWER
Between the events in Atlantic City and the summer of 1966, both the
movement and the nation underwent convulsive changes. Accelerating
anti-Vietnam War protests melded with black uprisings in the streets of
nearly a dozen cities. Ella Baker's beloved Harlem erupted in 1964,
followed by Watts in 1965 and dozens of urban areas in the years
thereafter. These tumultuous times tested even Baker's characteristic
calm. After 1966, SNCC went through a profound transformation, not
simply an escalation in militancy but also a shift in vision, philosophy,
and structure. The demand for inclusion into mainstream institutions
gave way, by the late 1960s, to the goal of revolutionary social
transformation, and the goal of an interracial beloved community gave
way to the call for black power, which for some— not all—meant black
nationalism and racial separatism of some type. Baker thought that some
aspects of that shift were progressive, while others were wholly
counterproductive.
Ella Baker did not let her differences with the new tendencies within
SNCC get in the way of her continued support for the original ideals of the
organization as she understood them or her love and affection for the
individuals involved, some of whom she had nurtured to political
adulthood. After all, if she had sustained her relationship with the NAACP
and SCLC, despite some very fundamental differences, why should she
sever her relationship with SNCC because it had departed from the path
she had envisioned for it? Baker's personal investment in the group was
much deeper. So she continued to aid and defend SNCC even as many of
its positions deviated from her own. At the same time, she began to
devote her energies and attentions to other related organizations and
causes.
The transition from the politics, personalities, and tactics of the early
1960s to those of the late 1960s has been analyzed as a shift from
nonviolence to self-defense, from a southern focus to a northern one, and
from interracial solidarity to black nationalism and separatism. The
shorthand version of the polar vision of the early versus the late sixties is
often summed up in the personas of the moderate and peace-loving
ministers of SCLC, on the one hand, and the militant, angry warriors of
the Black Panther Party, with whom SNCC briefly affiliated, on the other.
As with all simple bifurcations, this one does not hold up, especially
when one factors Ella Baker into the mix. She was a militant and a
democrat, a Harlemite born in the South, who in many ways considered
both places home. She was an internationalist who grounded herself
unapologetically in black communities and working-class black culture,
at the same time that she forged strong and enduring ties with white
radicals and liberals and other peoples of color.
The years between 1964 and 1966 were intense, hectic, and
confusing. The early consensus within SNCC had begun to unravel, an
unraveling precipitated by internal and external factors. A spiral of
unsettling and debilitating events hit the movement hard. Malcolm X,
whom some in SNCC had come to admire, was assassinated in Harlem in
February 1965. In Alabama, SNCC member Jimmy Lee Jackson was
killed that February after a demonstration, and Sammy Younge was shot
in January 1966. With great hopes for building an oasis of black political
empowerment in the Deep South, SNCC helped launch the Lowndes
County Freedom Organization in Alabama, using the black panther as its
symbol. Those hopes quickly faded. And headlines and television
newscasts across the country blazoned the images of civil rights workers
brutally attacked by policemen on horseback on the Edmund Pettus
Bridge outside Selma in March 1965. That event, termed “Bloody
Sunday,” further aggravated growing fissures within the movement over
strategy and leadership. Some were disappointed with King's leadership,
viewing it as vacillating and unresponsive to local desires. Prathia Hall,
the former director of SNCC'S project in Terrell County, Georgia, and a
devout apostle of nonviolence herself, was so upset by the way
nonviolence was preached so rigidly by SCLC forces after the Selma
attack that she left the movement entirely, exhausted and disillusioned.34
In a June 1966 protest march across the state of Mississippi, Stokely
Carmichael, the newly elected, charismatic, and controversial head of
SNCC, began to popularize the slogan “Black Power,” with militant SNCC
staffer Willie Ricks leading the chants as they caravanned from town to
town. The march had been hastily convened by Martin Luther King in an
effort to resume a one-man protest march initiated by James Meredith,
who had been shot soon after he had started on it. Both the nonviolent
and more militant factions of the rapidly evolving Black Freedom
Movement were involved. King led the marchers, and the paramilitary
group, Deacons for Defense, provided security, something to which King
had reluctantly conceded.
Carmichael had defeated John Lewis for the chairmanship of SNCC in
a close vote that some felt was less than fair. But once the organizational
reins were in his hands, Carmichael was determined to steer the group in
a more militant and nationalist direction. “Black power” as he conceived
it was a part of that vision. The very tone of it made some of the
movement's more mainstream supporters nervous. “Power”—as opposed
to “rights”— was a scary proposition to white liberals and to many black
liberals as well. It was not a term that scared Ella Baker, but she wanted
to know whom this power was for and how it would be exercised.
Even though Baker was still held in high regard by Carmichael and
others who had grown up politically within the environs of SNCC, she
recognized that the organization had changed in fundamental ways, as
had her relationship to it. The distance that developed between Baker and
SNCC gave her a sense of loss. After all, SNCC had been her political
family; the group made her feel at home more than any other
organization with which she had been affiliated. Throughout her political
life before 1960, she was in a constant struggle to be heard and listened
to. As a SNCC adviser, she was revered, and she accepted that status with
great humility. In the end, there was not a sharp break but a gradual drift
and erosion of the relationship. She attended fewer and fewer meetings
and was called less and less for consultation. Still, she spoke
supportively of the new SNCC leadership, explaining that people held
down so long would naturally be angry and impatient.
A sign of Baker's eroding relationship with SNCC was her low
visibility in an organization in which she was once a ubiquitous
presence. When Kathleen Cleaver joined SNCC'S New York staff in 1967,
she never saw Ella Baker come into the office, even though she sat at the
front desk and greeted all visitors and Baker was frequently in the
neighborhood. But Cleaver's recollections are a bit misleading. Ivanhoe
Donaldson, who was in charge of the New York office at that time,
recounted that he visited Baker regularly at her apartment on 135th
Street to talk things over and solicit her advice. “Ella didn't come to the
office,” Donaldson said; “the office came to her.”35 Baker was still a
valued adviser and sounding board for those who, like Donaldson, had
come up through the ranks of SNCC in the early 1960s. Yet she was not
the fixture that she had once been. Baker's involvement was diminishing,
as was her health. She was no longer able to keep up physically with a
hectic pace of activity.
Ella Baker never broke with SNCC emotionally, despite her political
differences. The organization and the group of people in it were the
political love of her life. In Baker's view, even the expulsion of whites
from the organization was not a reason to condemn it or write off its
remaining leaders, although this action clearly did not please her. Among
her closest political allies in the 1960s were white radicals like the
Bradens. At the same time, Baker had a keen sense of the cultural and
psychological character of racism and the importance of black selfdetermination. In a cultural context in which whites were generally more
educated, more privileged, and often more self-assured because of
conditioning, it was easy for black leadership, especially the leadership
of poor black southerners, to get displaced. Baker saw black power as a
response to that fear. It was not her response, but it was one she
understood. Baker had worked in all types of organizations, including
all-black ones. In the 1930s, she and George Schuyler had made the
tactical decision, based on the realities of segregation at the time, to
organize all-black cooperatives and buying clubs while maintaining an
affiliate relationship with the predominately white cooperative
movement. And Baker's work with the NAACP branches had been, for all
intents and purposes, black community organizing. Even when SNCC was
formed, Baker understood and insisted on the importance of black
leadership. But she never argued for a separatist/nationalist agenda. In
her words: “The logical groups for blacks to coalesce with would be the
impoverished white, the misrepresented and impoverished Indians … or
the alienated Mexican-American. These are the natural allies in my
book.” However, she added the caveat that groups had to be united
before they tried to forge coalitions with other groups: “You've got to
coalesce from a position of power, not just for the sake of saying ‘we're
together.’”36
It should be noted that by 1966 there were several cleavages within
SNCC, and those advocating black power were by no means
homogeneous. Stokely Carmichael and Cleveland Sellers called for
black power while asserting they were never antiwhite. However, the
Atlanta SNCC group, which had undergone an enormous transformation
from the early days when Julian Bond and Lonnie King had been
involved, made no such professions. The members of the Chicago SNCC
affiliate went so far as to call on blacks to “fill ourselves with hate for all
things white.”37 It was Carmichael's more thoughtful advocacy of black
power to which Baker was sympathetic. In an interview with John
Britton in 1967, Baker explained that if one really listened to
Carmichael, there was nothing offensive in his explication of the
concept. From her point of view, he was talking about what SNCC had
talked about for years: self-determination for oppressed people, namely,
black people.38
Still, Baker felt the organization getting away from itself, as well as
from her. She wanted to re-anchor it. She wanted to sit people down and
push them to think through the issues they were taking on, sometimes
without much thought or deliberation. As an almost last ditch effort, she
proposed at a May SNCC retreat in Kingston Springs, Tennessee, that the
organization consider a series of seminars on “revolutionary ethics,” to
be led by third world revolutionaries. The idea never bore fruit, but it
seems as though Baker may have been groping for a way to challenge
ideologically the direction she perceived the group was headed in. And
since a delegation of SNCC people had just traveled to Africa and many
were hungrily devouring The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon,
along with works by the Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah and the
Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral, perhaps Baker hoped that
bringing in third world revolutionaries could be a unifying force.39
From the summer of 1966 until December of that year, SNCC was
moving more and more toward a black nationalist position. Carmichael
had popularized the slogan “Black Power,” but black power was not the
same thing as black separatism. White and black antiracists could still
work together in Carmichael's scenario, but whites needed to take up the
task of working in white communities to combat racism there. As their
roles became increasingly circumscribed and some slogans and attitudes
turned explicitly antiwhite, many whites voluntarily left SNCC. Stalwarts
like Bob and Dottie Zellner stayed the longest. In December 1966, SNCC
met at the summer home of a black entertainer, Peg Leg Bates, in upstate
New York. The secluded setting was chosen so that the group could
focus on some of the internal tensions that were plaguing it and
hopefully achieve a greater degree of peace in the large and fractious
family. This was not to be. A general call went out that everyone should
try to attend this meeting. So, even people who were no longer on SNCC'S
payroll or actively working in a project came to see whether fences could
be mended and what could be salvaged of the organization they so
deeply loved. The Atlanta office headed by Bill Ware was advocating a
rigid nationalist agenda and came to the meeting to argue that whites
should be expelled from SNCC altogether. Judy Richardson recalls that
tempers were so inflamed that it was the first SNCC gathering—which
were known for their passionate debates—where she actually feared for
her physical safety.
Ella Baker was there, too. She drove up from New York City with
Joanne Grant and Bob Zellner, a white southerner who began working
with SNCC in the fall of 1961 after a summer internship at the Highlander
Folk School. He had been arrested, beaten, and tortured in a Louisiana
prison and had proven himself time and again as one of SNCC'S most loyal
members. His wife Dorothy had made similar sacrifices. Zellner did not
know quite what to expect at the meeting, but it was an emotionally
charged moment in his political and personal life. Ella Baker softened
the blow he was about to be dealt. During the hour-long ride to the
meeting site, “she prepared me for what was going to happen,” Bob
recalled. “She told me that she had been talking to people and that there
was a strong move to make the organization a black organization so that
it could be more effective in the north. She told me that Stokely and
others intended to support the idea that we [Bob and Dorothy] be made
exceptions because we had been with SNCC from the beginning and there
would be a place for us. It was not cut and dry,” he recalled her telling
him. She did not advise him what to do but had likely arranged the car
ride as a time to raise the issue and give Zellner a chance to reflect on the
situation he was walking into. It was at this meeting that Zellner
proposed a SNCC-sponsored project focused on building support for
SNCC'S agenda in the white community, which he and Dorothy would run
and raise funds for. The idea was rejected because, as he put it, he was
unwilling to be a second-class member of the organization; even though
he supported black power, he felt strongly about the principle of black
and white together in a single movement organization. He and Dorothy
reluctantly parted ways with SNCC at that point.40
Three weeks later, despite palpable tensions and outright animus
between certain factions of SNCC, Baker still retained confidence in the
group's larger humanitarian mission, explaining to an interviewer that
“SNCC defines itself in terms of the blacks, but is concerned with all
excluded people.”41 The group's deepening interest in and ties to
revolutionary movements in other parts of the world bore her out on that
point. But she was stretching it. Clearly, not everyone in SNCC,
particularly the group in Atlanta, felt that way. When asked during the
same interview, “What is the basic goal of SNCC?,” Baker replied, “To
change society so that the have-nots can share in it.”42 This had been her
basic goal for some thirty-five years. After the upstate New York
meeting, she had her doubts about the group's sustainability, but publicly
she still wanted to put the best face on things.
For its first four years of existence as a collective, SNCC functioned
like a political family. When the family broke up in the late 1960s, the
results were traumatic for many. There were bitter debates, resignations,
self-imposed exiles, and the severance of longstanding friendships. It
was unclear to many exactly where Baker stood in all of the conflict.
Perhaps most saw her as standing above it. Each side claimed her as its
own. She never supported black separatism or the macho posturing that
sometimes accompanied it, but Carmichael still held her in the highest
esteem and vice versa. When he was asked to pay tribute to her at a SCEF
fund-raiser in 1968, even though it meant sharing the stage with white
SNCC members whom he had done battle with not long before, he
“simply could not say, no.”43 His loyalty to and reverence for Baker
outweighed any negative feelings he might have had toward former
comrades.
In April 1968, at one of the most critical and confusing moments in
the movement's evolution, Carmichael appeared at the Roosevelt Hotel
in New York City to speak at the dinner for Baker, flanked by
bodyguards and accompanied by an entourage. The atmosphere at the
hotel that evening was palpably tense. It was an extension of the tension
that was in the air throughout the nation. Only three weeks before,
Martin Luther King had been assassinated while visiting Memphis,
Tennessee, in support of a black sanitation workers' strike. Black urban
neighborhoods across the country had erupted in violent protest at the
news of his murder. The rubble was still smoldering when the interracial
audience gathered on April 24 to honor Ella Baker. Rosa Parks had been
scheduled to appear, but she was still too distraught over King's death to
even make the trip. The gathering had been conceived of as a tribute, a
fund-raiser, and a unity dinner. Anne Braden, who coordinated the event
on behalf of SCEF, asked Carmichael if in his speech he might try to be
conciliatory, to use the opportunity to bridge some of the gulfs and
schisms that had been growing within the movement. He refused. “I was
not there to gloss over serious political differences. I was there to honor
Miss Baker plain and simple.”44 Although SCEF raised some $30,000 that
evening, no political bridges were built.
In Ella Baker's view, “black power” was a misunderstood and
sometimes misappropriated term. When it was framed as selfdetermination, she could identify with the concept to some extent.
Referring to Carmichael, Baker observed, “I've seen him make some
very profound developments from this whole concept of black power.
I've seen him do it at a level that there is nothing irritating about it for
anybody who is willing to have sense enough to deal with the facts at
all.” Her concern about the excesses and reckless use of black power
rhetoric can be partly attributed to the fact that “black power” became, in
some cases, an empty slogan taken up by young people “who had not
gone through any experiences or steps of thinking” that Carmichael
had.45 For the inexperienced, it simply meant “give us what we are
demanding now.” But SNCC members who had marched, picketed,
petitioned, and pleaded had, in Baker's view, earned the right to be
impatient. They had also earned the consent of poor black southerners to
speak in tandem with them and at times on their behalf.
Baker was supportive of intensified struggle, increased confrontation,
and even sharper, more revolutionary rhetoric. She viewed explicitly
anti-white sentiments, however, as counterproductive, misguided, and
shortsighted. She saw some SNCC members' use of the term “honky,” for
example, as unfortunate and born of frustration and anger rather than a
calculated political gesture.46
Baker compared the appeal of the new revolutionary rhetoric to the
stale and unmoving demands and language of the more mainstream civil
rights organizations and leaders at the time. Referring to a leaflet for
“Solidarity Day,” drafted by her friend Bayard Rustin, Baker confessed,
“This doesn't touch me”; it “leaves me cold.” She concluded: “I would
think it would leave people who are closest to the activist movement, the
younger people, even more chilled—so, I don't think it's unnatural for
them [young black activists in SNCC] to feel the need for the more
revolutionary method.”47 When she tried to explain to an interviewer in
1968 why she thought white liberals had such a hard time understanding
the urgent demand for black power, she recited some lines of verse: “The
frog beneath the harrow knows, where the nail point goes, while the
butterfly upon the road, preaches contentment to the toad.”48 In other
words, those with privilege and insulation from certain abuses have the
luxury to insist on patience and moderation. Those experiencing the
painful results of injustice, and those who identify with them and try to
see the world through their eyes, have a different perspective altogether.
For most of her adult political life, Baker's perspective was that of the
frog beneath the harrow.
Baker worked as a paid member of SCEF until 1967 and functioned as
consultant and board member after that. She continued to lend her name
and waning energies to other campaigns and causes as well. The two
principal areas of political work Baker focused on in the 1970s were
opposition to political repression and persecution at home and to war,
imperialism, and colonialism abroad. She also accepted an increasing
number of invitations from women's organizations and participated in
several of the founding meetings of the Third World Women's Alliance
and the Women's Emergency Committee.49 In 1969, Ella Baker went to
Atlanta to deliver a talk at the Institute for the Black World titled “The
Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle.” There, she criticized sexist
practices and attitudes within the civil rights movement and went on to
describe women as the “backbone” of the movement, explaining that
“[w]hen demonstrations took place and when the community acted,
usually it was some women who came to the fore.”50
FREE ANGELA, FREE OURSELVES
One campaign around a prominent woman activist that Baker took
special interest in was the “Free Angela” campaign. A Communist Party
member and Black Panther Party supporter, Angela Y. Davis had been
implicated in a failed prisoner rescue attempt in California in which
several people were killed. Davis was not directly involved, but a gun
registered to her was found at the scene, and she was closely associated
with two of the men involved, prisoner-activist George Jackson and his
younger brother, Jonathan. This provided enough of a reason for the
authorities to issue a warrant for her arrest and, when she fled, for the FBI
to declare her one of its ten most wanted persons. Davis was eventually
captured, and an international campaign was mounted to win her release,
with her supporters arguing that putting her in jail was an attempt by the
government to silence a radical black voice for change.
At one of its regular board meetings held in Birmingham, Baker
proposed that SCEF should get involved in the National Free Angela
Coalition. Anne Braden recalled years later that she was not altogether
convinced that Angela's campaign was where SCEF should place its
limited energies, or that it could make a difference, but Baker was
adamant.51 Feeling respect and sympathy for Davis's plight, she
understood all too well how government persecution targeted outspoken
political activists. Other SCEF board members were sympathetic, too,
having had their own run-ins with the FBI and HUAC. Baker's specific
suggestion was that the group contact Davis's mother, Sallye Davis,
herself a veteran civil rights activist and former member of the Southern
Negro Youth Congress, and look into the idea of having some type of
support rally in the family's hometown of Birmingham.52 When SCEF
accepted Baker's proposal, she called up Sallye Davis, who came over
right away to where the group was meeting. After all, Baker knew the
landscape in Birmingham. She also knew Sallye Davis by reputation and
thought they would have no trouble pulling off a successful event there.
In December 1970, a citywide Committee to Defend Angela Davis was
formed in Birmingham, and on Monday, January 11, 1971, Baker flew
into town to deliver the keynote address at the city's first “Free Angela”
rally, held at the First Congregational Church. Baker's FBI file, which had
been fairly dormant for several years, was reactivated as she began
speaking across the country on behalf of Communist Party member
Davis.53
For Baker, Angela Davis's imprisonment had concrete and symbolic
significance. As a young black woman and a radical intellectual who had
refused to be intimidated or silenced by harassment (she had been fired
as a professor in the California state university system by Governor
Ronald Reagan for her political views), Davis represented, Baker felt, a
spirit of resistance that had to be defended. Although different in style,
age, and demeanor, Baker may have identified with Davis on some level.
She immediately felt protective. She claimed Davis as one of her own,
praising her “strength and moral courage,” even though the two women
had never met. Davis had been jailed in October 1970, and the campaign
for her release was growing. Baker contacted friends around the country
to ask them to support the campaign. On February 24, 1971, Baker spoke
on the University of Virginia campus in Richmond in a call for Angela
Davis's release from prison, saying that “we have rights only as long as
we are willing to struggle for them.”54
By the 1970s, when she was in her seventies and suffering from a
variety of physical ailments, Ella Baker was no longer able to maintain
the rigorous day-to-day organizer's regimen that had characterized most
of her adult life, yet she remained as engaged as health and stamina
would allow— giving speeches, offering counsel, lending her name to
petitions, and helping to raise funds for a variety of campaigns and
organizations.
During the 1970s, Baker became deeply involved in an effort to
organize a viable left-wing political party; the Mass Party Organizing
Committee (MPOC) was an exploratory committee that lasted nearly
seven years but never actually formed a party. Some of her former SNCC
colleagues were also involved. In 1977, Baker served as co-chairperson
of MPOC, along with a leftist lawyer, Arthur Kinoy.55 The MPOC
experiment was an attempt to transcend the painful limitations of the
two-party system that the MFDP had encountered in 1964 and create a
truly progressive alternative. A paper that Kinoy wrote in 1974, “Toward
a Mass Party of the People,” served as a call to action and as the group's
founding document. The group articulated a progressive and far-reaching
platform that encompassed many of the goals the MFDP had aspired to in
terms of the democratic representation of the disenfranchised, but it went
further. Based in New York City with affiliates throughout the country,
the MPOC hoped to solidify an interracial antiracist constituency.56 The
group also embraced an explicitly socialist vision and took strong
positions against the War in Vietnam and on behalf of Puerto Rican
independence. Poverty and racism, as well as the plight of workers, were
critical domestic issues highlighted by the MPOC. Baker participated in
several workshops, retreats, and administrative meetings in 1976 and
1977 trying to consolidate the MPOC's eclectic base of supporters.
Unfortunately, it never bore the fruit that its founders had hoped for.57
More than ever, Ella Baker identified closely with leftist and radical
forces on the international scene. The issue of Puerto Rican
independence was especially relevant to her internationalist vision. Her
treasured clippings file was full of news articles and literature on Puerto
Rico. For someone who had lived lived in New York City over many
decades, the Puerto Rican community was a large and politically vibrant
presence. In the 1950s, Baker worked closely with Puerto Rican
community activists in the school reform struggle. So, when her friend
Annie Stein, who had been involved in the same struggle and many other
progressive causes thereafter, got involved with the Puerto Rican
Solidarity Organization (PRSO), Baker did, too.58
By the time she became active in PRSO in the 1970s, Baker's asthma
had worsened, and arthritis slowed her down even more. She did attend
meetings, write letters of support, and speak at rallies, but her ability to
travel was limited. In 1974, along with Noam Chomsky, Fran Beal, Dave
Dellinger, and Jim Forman, she lent her name to the roster of the
planning committee for the National Puerto Rican Independence rally.59
In 1978, she agreed to serve as “spokesperson for the ‘U.S. People's
Delegation’” to the United Nations Special Committee on
Decolonization.60 She delivered an eloquent keynote address to an
overflow crowd at a Puerto Rican Independence rally in Madison Square
Garden—featured in the final frame of Joanne Grant's film documentary
Fundi—that reflected the passion and insights that Baker brought to the
the issue.61
Even though she could not be as active as she would have liked,
Baker encouraged her younger SNCC comrades, whom she still kept in
touch with and advised when they would listen, to take a wider interest
in global politics and to travel and meet revolutionaries from other parts
of the world. She did not have to do too much persuading because this
was the direction SNCC was headed in anyway. A delegation had visited
Africa, and Carmichael toured a half-dozen countries in the late 1960s,
meeting with radical and revolutionary leaders. Puerto Rico, because of
its proximity and colonial relationship to the United States, was of
particular significance, Baker argued. She made arrangements for
Carmichael and Ivanhoe Donaldson to visit the island and participate in a
conference on the Independista movement. “Her contacts were so
extensive,” Ivanhoe marveled. “She knew what had gone on [in Puerto
Rico] by the time we got back because she had talked to people down
there. Her connections were amazing.” Even though she did not travel
internationally, her vision and her network did.62
Ella Baker maintained international connections by building personal
relationships with people from around the world who were visitors to the
United States. In 1976, in the immediate wake of the historic Soweto
youth uprising against South African apartheid, Baker befriended Violet
Cherry, a South African living temporarily in the United States. The
woman's son had been arrested for political activism in the South African
city of Durban, and she was trying to publicize his case and garner
support. Baker agreed to host a meeting of New York activists to talk
about the case of twenty-two-year-old Lloyd Padayachi. Baker extended
herself to his mother as she had done with so many other mothers of
young activists over the years. National boundaries were not relevant.63
Ella Baker maintained a myriad of political affiliations in the 1970s,
most of which involved more than simply lending her name to a
letterhead; she was engaged in real consultation and strategizing. She
attended several antiwar rallies, spoke twice at International Women's
Day activities in New York, and signed numerous letters and petitions
for various progressive and left-wing causes. She had always been
politically promiscuous in this way, insisting that no one organization
could ever claim her full loyalty, which she reserved for the larger
movement and its larger goals. However, in the early 1970s, it was not
the survival of any single organization that worried Baker; rather, it was
the survival of the movement to which she had devoted her life.
Ultimately, she remained convinced that the protracted democratic
revolution that she believed in so fiercely, that awkward circuitous
process of generation after generation of people striving to push the
world toward a greater justice and humanity would continue. But the
question was, In what form? Would external repression or internal
divisions undo what she had watched a generation of activists build? At
age seventy-six, she mused, “I don't claim to have any corner on an
answer, but I believe that the struggle is eternal. Someone else carries
on.”64
Even as SNCC began to unravel organizationally, Baker looked for
promise and hope in the plethora of local, national, and international
struggles that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s. They were sometimes
poorly organized or short-lived, but they were cause for optimism that a
spirit of resistance was alive. The extensive clippings file that Baker kept
in the 1970s carefully followed the plight of the Soledad prison activists
in California, the Attica prison uprising in New York, the Native
American struggle at Wounded Knee, as well as events in Puerto Rico,
South Africa, and Vietnam.65
In her thinking and in the way she lived her life, Baker was much
more of a materialist (in the sense of being proactive) than an idealist.
That is, she was a practical, action-oriented kind of person. Exploring
how ideas were relevant and linked to concrete experiences was her
approach. Yet, despite the importance of her deeds, perhaps her most
lasting contribution to social justice movements of the late twentieth
century was in the form of her ideas. She provided movement activists in
the 1960s and 1970s with a philosophy, a worldview, an approach to
social change that they took with them into cultural, political and global
arenas and into their personal lives, careers and relationships. Baker's
radical democratic humanism was the core philosophy that gave meaning
to her personal and political practice for over a half century. In her role
as a movement teacher and insurgent intellectual, she sparked new ideas,
both reaffirmed and rejected old ones, and gave a new generation the
intellectual, political, and, at times, material wherewithal to carry on.
12 A FREIRIAN TEACHER, A
GRAMSCIAN INTELLECTUAL, AND
A RADICAL HUMANIST
ELLA BAKER'S LEGACY
Intellectual work for radical democrats must always link the visionary to
the practical.
Cornel West, 1990
If there is any philosophy, it's that those who have walked a certain path
should know some things, should remember some things that they can
pass on, that others can use to walk the path a little better.
Ella Baker, 1980
Ella Baker performed her share of menial movement chores over the
years, from typing leaflets to licking stamps to buying toiletries for jailed
protesters. She assumed multiple and fluctuating titles and identities, but
her most enduring role in the black freedom movement of the 1960s and
early 1970s was that of “master teacher” and resident griot.1 This role
was most pronounced during her work with SNCC from 1960 to 1966.
Baker was a powerful intellectual presence within the organization and a
moral and ethical compass for the young activists with whom she
worked so intimately and intensely. Her young protégés went from their
classrooms at Spelman, Howard, Fisk, and Tougaloo Colleges to Ella
Baker's classroom without walls. It was a very different kind of
classroom, indeed, one infused with a radical pedagogy, epistemology,
and worldview. In an article about the influence that Baker and her friend
and colleague Septima Clark, both “activist community educators,” had
on the radical curricula of the Citizenship and Freedom Schools of the
1960s, the scholar-activist Bill Ayers writes: “This kind of education
opposes fear, ignorance, and helplessness by strengthening knowledge
and ability. It enables people to question, to wonder, and to look
critically … it is an education for freedom.”2
TEACHER AND PRACTITIONER OF A
RADICAL DEMOCRATIC PEDAGOGY
Baker had insisted all her life that she would never become a teacher
because of the restrictive social role it represented for women and
because of the class and gender expectation that all capable black girls of
her generation were obliged to become teachers. She saw the teaching
profession as an elite and conservative one, for the most part, requiring
women to be prim and proper and to follow the dominant protocol for
ladylike behavior. In describing early-twentieth-century uplift ideology,
the historian Kevin Gaines writes, “The bourgeois morality of their
cultural mentors was drummed into black students: piety, thrift, selfcontrol and the work ethic,” as well as a “Victorian sexual morality” and
a sense of bourgeois etiquette.3 Teachers collaborated in this
socialization and were victims of it at the same time, in Baker's view.
She noticed, for example, that when “progressive” and open-minded
young women who were sent off for teacher training returned, they were
frequently “no longer that type of person… . [A]nyone with spirit would
be curbed.”4 This was not what Baker wanted for herself, and so she
declined to pursue a traditional teaching career, in spite of or perhaps
because of her mother's wishes, and turned down a relatively prestigious
offer from the president of Bennet College.5 She was stubbornly
determined to be her own woman, and she would encourage the young
women of SNCC to do the same. As SNCC activist Barbara Jones
(Omolade) observed, Baker “was really … able to disavow all those
other kinds of womanhood that were offered to black women” and to
carve out her own identity as a radical, an intellectual, and, ultimately, a
teacher.6
In the context of SNCC, much of Ella Baker's leadership was didactic.
She was the teacher-activist in every sense. Joyce Ladner described
Baker's teaching style this way: she “was a quiet presence in a way. What
she did was to distill, sum up and take [discussions] to the next level,
point out gaps in your own information, enlighten you in some broader
sense, bring information to you about what other people were doing and
voids that you could fill.”7 In Baker's view, people had many of the
answers within themselves; teachers and leaders simply had to facilitate
the process of tapping and framing that knowledge, of drawing it out.
Given this view, debate and the open exchange of ideas were critically
important. Ladner continued: “You see, Miss Baker's presence was felt at
meetings even when we stood there and talked and screamed, with her
tacit approval, and she just stood there but she always knew that we
would at some point have to stake an opinion about it.”8 This description
of Ella Baker's subtle teaching style is reminiscent of Gerald Graff's
creative pedagogical theory, which advocates using conflict itself as a
teaching tool.9
Ella Baker's early reservations about traditional methods of teaching
came in part from the conservatizing impact she felt teacher training had
on the young women of her generation and her mother's generation. She
objected not only to how most schools taught but also to what they
taught: conformity and obedience. In contrast, Baker's pedagogy was
democratic and reciprocal. Although they never met, and there is no
evidence that she was familiar with his writings, Baker's teaching style
very much resembled that of the Latin American educator and activist
Paulo Freire. Within the circle of inexperienced but courageous young
activists who became Baker's students, she challenged the conventional
meanings of both education and leadership. Building on the progressive
philosophy of education she had embraced during her time as a teacher
for the Workers' Education Project, and augmented by her own political
experiences and personal sensibilities, Baker concluded that curricula
had to be socially relevant and that learning needed to be based on a fluid
and interactive relationship between student and teacher.10
Baker's approach to learning and teaching was consistent with that of
Italian Marxist and theorist Antonio Gramsci. “Every teacher,” he said,
“is always a pupil and every pupil is always a teacher.”11 Baker tried to
build camaraderie with her young allies because it was her belief that
young people should be able to “feel a sort of communion and friendship
with their teachers.”12 Moreover, her view of teaching for liberation was
based on the need to empower ordinary people to dig within themselves
and their collective experiences for the answers to social and political
questions. She did not want her students to see her as the repository of all
knowledge but to discover their own insights and knowledge base.13 As
the sociologist and movement historian Charles Payne put it, “Miss
Baker was reluctant to see people entrust too many of their dreams to
individual leaders,” or teachers.14 They had to rely on their own
judgments.
According to SNCC member Prathia Hall, Baker's style of teaching was
a lesson in itself. She “was a consummate teacher, always opening us to
new understandings,” Hall remembered. “It was never the pounding,
‘you must do this, you must do that,’ but by raising a question and then
raising another question and then helping us to see what was being
revealed through the answer was her mode of leadership. She was the
one who taught us how to organize … to organize in such a way that
when we left, the people were fully capable of carrying on the movement
themselves.”15 Baker taught by inquiry and by example. She did not tell
people what to do or think; she guided them toward answers and
solutions by teasing out the ideas and knowledge that already existed
within the group, and within individuals, and then by encouraging people
to express that information in their own words. She was also patient
enough to allow this process to unfold.
Echoing Hall's and Ladner's observations, a former Spelman College
activist, Lenora Taitt-Magubane, recalled, “Miss Ella would ask
questions, key questions … and sometimes people don't recognize or
appreciate this as leadership… . She would sit there and she would
literally almost let a meeting fall apart. People were at each other before
she would intervene, because she wanted the decision to come out of the
group and not be hers. She would say: ‘Well, what about so and so?’ or
‘Well, have you thought through this or that?’ She was always pushing
people to think and challenging you.”16 Mary King, a young white
woman whom Baker recruited to SNCC through her YWCA work and who
worked closely with Baker in Atlanta, remembers her mentor as a
powerfully effective teacher. “With Socratic persistence, in her resonant
and commanding voice, she would query, ‘Now let me ask this again,
what is our purpose here? What are we trying to accomplish?’ Again and
again she would force us to articulate our assumptions… . She
encouraged me to avoid being doctrinaire. ‘Ask questions, Mary,’ she
would say.”17
Ella Baker also pushed Eleanor Holmes Norton, a young African
American law graduate from Yale, to think for herself and to ask
questions: “Miss Baker's presence and her contributions were different
than telling us what to do. Which was one of her gifts, real gifts—such
that the intervention always seemed to be, ‘Wow, isn't that exactly right?
Why didn't we think of that?’” At the same time, she adds, Baker
brought seriousness, sobriety and maturity to SNCC'S deliberations. “What
professionalized the meetings was Ella Baker,” Holmes Norton
concluded.18 Baker's powerful moral and intellectual presence and the
confidence she exuded were critical in inspiring Holmes Norton to
configure her own identity as a politician and a feminist.
Ella Baker taught, but she rarely lectured. Part of her criticism of
southern preachers was that they constituted what she termed “a verbal
society” and did little more than verbalize.19 As a young child, Baker
had been an eloquent public speaker; tutored in diction, grammar, and
presentation by her mother, she competed in oratory contests around the
South and often spoke at church and school events. However, she was
turned off by certain types of speech making early on. When she was
about seven or eight years old, her parents took her to hear a public
lecture by Charles Sachel Morris Jr. Baker was initially impressed by his
“flowery speech” and “good articulation”; but when she heard him
another time deliver the exact same speech, she realized it was more
performance than substance. So, when one of her professors suggested
she might consider going on the lecture circuit after graduation, she “was
saved from that” by the negative encounters she had had with
disingenuous orators who had turned her off entirely.20
Baker's feeling was that even though “I had the oratorical chords, I
resented oratory. You should be able to have some speech making that
has some purpose,” rather than simply dazzling an audience to boost
your ego.21 Again, Baker's views on social action and the formulation
and exchange of ideas were consistent with Gramsci's. He wrote: “The
mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence,
which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but
in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer,
‘permanent persuader’ not just a simple orator.”22 Baker expanded on
this notion, insisting that one's words are important “only as they help
people to do things that are of value to themselves. And we've had too
much of the mesmerizing type of talking.”23 Catherine Orr has
characterized Baker's rhetorical style as a conscious reflection of her
egalitarian and democratic politics and as being deliberately engaging
rather than mesmerizing. According to Orr, the way she spoke, her
choice of pronouns, where she stood relative to her audience, and the
cadence of her voice all conveyed a message about who she was and
what kind of political vision she wanted to project to her listeners.24
Baker had a talent for making complex ideas simple. This was another
carryover from her experience with the Worker's Education Project, in
which it was stressed that teachers should “use words workers can
understand.”25 Her teaching method resembled a conversation more than
a tutorial. SNCC activist Joyce Ladner attested to this: “I don't remember
her citing works of particular authors that we should read. I think what
she did more of was instill information and put it in a form that would be
palatable to us… . [S]he may have mentioned Garvey or mentioned
someone else, but she used that as a launching pad more than anything
else. She was a practitioner, … for her it was always getting back to the
practical aspects of how do you go about changing things.”26
Ella Baker, like Paulo Freire, viewed education as a collective and
creative enterprise requiring collaboration and exchange at every stage.
She would have likely agreed with Freire's statement that “to teach is not
to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or
construction of knowledge.”27 A part of that process, both Freire and
Baker insisted, was the ability to humble oneself and to simply listen.
This was also a part of the process of taming the ego, in Baker's opinion.
She repeatedly criticized unchecked, inflated egos and excessive
individualism as obstacles to social change. “The importance of silence
in the context of communication is fundamental,” Freire wrote. He went
on: “It is intolerable to see teachers who give themselves the right to
behave as if they own the truth… . [T]he democratic-minded teacher
who learns to speak by listening is interrupted by the intermittent silence
of his or her own capacity to listen, waiting for that voice that may desire
to speak from the depths of its own silent listening.”28 Baker spent many
hours sitting silently through long and cumbersome SNCC discussions,
making her interventions often at the very end of the meeting. She
interrupted only to make sure that others were allowed to speak and that
the more confident speakers were made to listen. This was the pattern
she established early on in her relationship with the youth activists in
SNCC, and it was a practice that became characteristic of SNCC'S
deliberations and Baker's role in them. Prathia Hall took the lessons
seriously when she began organizing in small communities in Georgia:
“We'd sit sometimes and rock on the porch for hours. Our intention was
to finally convince a person to go and register. But we'd sit and we'd
listen, and we'd listen to the person talk about survival and talk about
families … I think some of the most important lessons I learned were on
the porches of people who couldn't read or write their names.”29
Baker's political philosophy emphasized the importance of tapping
oppressed communities for their own knowledge, strength, and
leadership in constructing models for social change. She took seriously
and tried to understand seriously the ways in which poor black people
saw and analyzed the world. And her own base of knowledge came
primarily from those same communities. In many respects, Baker was
what Gramscian theorists refer to as an “organic intellectual.”30 Part of
her work as a writer, orator, and analyst was not to invent or impose
ideas on the masses but rather to help them, as she put it, “see their own
ideas.”31
Baker functioned as an organic intellectual to the extent that she
validated and relied on the collective wisdom that resided in poor and
oppressed communities and to the extent that she respected and affirmed
the intellectual capacity and political astuteness of individuals who had
no formal academic training or credentials. “I have never been diploma
conscious,” Baker once remarked.32 For her, wisdom came from many
sources and was transmitted via many different languages, including the
language of action. Academic credentials alone did not impress Baker,
especially when such training was used to advance individual careers
rather than for some greater good. From her point of view, her own
political education was derived not only from her formal training at
Shaw University but also from what she learned on the streets and in
meeting places and union halls of New York City, as well as at rural and
urban churches, barber shops, and kitchen tables throughout the South.
This type of popular education she saw as vital.
Radical black women intellectuals who have tried to function in this
same tradition have articulated Baker's epistemological stance in their
writings. The historian and political activist Elsa Barkley Brown, for
example, has identified her mother and the larger southern black
community of which she was a part as her primary intellectual mentors
while she was growing up. They taught her the indispensable lessons of
“how to ask the right questions” and of having respect “for people's
abilities to understand their own lives.”33 Ella Baker learned the same
lessons from her childhood community and from the people she worked
with in New York and throughout the South.
Ella Baker was Edward Said's kind of intellectual. For Said, a
Palestinian activist and literary scholar, being an intellectual means, as
Baker herself once wrote, “to think in radical terms.”34 Said elaborates,
explaining that the role of a radical intellectual is “to confront orthodoxy
and dogma (rather than reproduce them), to be someone who cannot
easily be coopted by governments or corporations, and whose raison
d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely
forgotten or swept under the rug.”35 Said uses the compelling metaphor
of the exile to further amplify his point:
Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still
possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of
barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing
authorities towards the margins, where you see things that are
usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the
conventional and comfortable… . [T]o be as marginal and
undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for an
intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveler rather than
the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than the habitual,
to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given
status quo. The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of
the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing
change, to moving on, not standing still.”36
The content of Ella Baker's teachings and her style of “renegade
intellectual” work, as Robin Kelley might describe it, was a powerful
force in the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s and beyond.37 But
what was the substance of her ideas and her worldview? Her political
and moral influence on SNCC from 1960 to 1966 can be divided into
several areas. First, she encouraged a democratic practice and an
egalitarian structure as an alternative to the normative presence of many
undemocratic traditions in both the black and the white American
institutions that the young people had been a part of, mainly schools and
churches. Second, she gently nudged the students in the direction of
embracing a class analysis of racism and injustice that allied them with
those at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy—those who
were sometimes at the margins of mainstream societies, black and white,
but who were central to resistance efforts.
Third, Ella Baker affirmed in her practice and her teachings a style of
personal grassroots organizing that, while more common among women
than men, was a part of a radical democratic humanist tradition that both
men and women could lay claim to. With the subtle power of her
presence, Baker offered a different model of gender relations and a
broader spectrum of gender identities. Her own transgressive female
identity was represented by her uninhibited occupation of predominately
male political spaces, her refusal to be a conventional teacher, and her
rejection of a social identification as someone's wife. Her way of being a
black woman challenged men in SNCC to rethink manhood and
masculinity, just as it gave women in the movement a widened sense of
their own possibilities as doers, thinkers, and powerful social change
agents.
In essence, Baker's leadership from 1960 to 1966 helped create within
SNCC the space where traditional hierarchies of race, class, and, to a
lesser extent, gender could be turned on their heads.38 As the progenitor
and presiding elder of SNCC for the better part of the decade, Baker
helped set the terms for an interracial and interclass organization of men
and women to function in a principled and nontraditional manner,
reinforcing a new set of social and interpersonal relations in the process.
To say this is not to portray SNCC as an egalitarian utopia; it was not.
However, Ella Baker's leadership and presence helped fashion the
practice and philosophy of the group in such a way that traditional norms
of male dominance, white privilege, and class elitism were overturned in
much of the day-to-day functioning of the group and in the public image
it projected. In the Jim Crow South, in an America still unready to afford
black citizens the most basic civil rights, a small cadre of whites were
persuaded (at least in principle and to a large extent in practice) to accept
a secondary, supportive role in a black-led organization.39 And, in a
society and culture whose main institutions still accorded women a
subordinate status, men were persuaded to accept an organization whose
intellectual, spiritual, and political guide was—rather than a towering
male patriarch or a messiah of some kind—an unassuming middle-aged
woman. This was radical indeed.
By rejecting the dominant values of society and the elitist markers of
supposed success, Baker encouraged young people to wrap themselves in
a different culture, not as an escape but as part of their re-envisioning
and redefining a new form of social relations that prioritized cooperation
and collectivism over competition and individualism.
The inversion of conventional class hierarchies within SNCC was most
pronounced. Talented and educated young black people were persuaded
to forfeit their privileged claim to leadership of the race, a status that
would naturally have been afforded them according to pre-World War II
uplift ideology, and instead to defer to the collective wisdom of
sharecroppers, maids, and manual laborers, many of whom lacked even a
high school education. White activists were encouraged to reject existing
race and class hierarchies and do the same. This was a fundamental
break with black politics as usual. Poor southern black people were not
merely SNCC'S constituency; they were revered for their knowledge,
commitment, and sacrifice. Women like Fannie Lou Hamer and others
became the heroines of the movement. Biographer Chana Kai Lee points
out that Fannie Lou Hamer was a serious movement strategist and
analyst and that those who worked closely with her understood this quite
clearly and valued it.40
decidedly open and fluid structure, especially during the first
few years, made it possible for those who were poor and working-class,
women, youths, and political novices to exercise enormous influence
within the group and play central roles. Structurally, SNCC had a
chairperson and an executive secretary, but when asked who the leader of
the group was, SNCC members would often reply, “We all are.” Even with
strong personalities like Jim Forman and later Ruby Doris Smith
Robinson and Stokely Carmichael in official leadership positions, there
was a rambunctious confidence among the rank and file that militated
against heavy-handed top-down leadership, something that Ella Baker
applauded and encouraged.
SNCC'S
A DIFFERENT CONSTRUCTION OF
GENDER IDENTITY
Baker was much more explicit in the expression of her ideas about social
class and race than she was when it came to gender. Diane Nash once
observed, “Ella Baker was a feminist more in what she did than what she
said.”41 Her views and lessons about gender politics and identities were
deeply embedded in her daily work and in the public image she
cultivated. Through private advice and public example, Baker helped
young women activists navigate the minefield of gender and sexual
politics within the movement and within their own lives. For example,
Casey Hayden, a young white field secretary from Texas, consulted
Baker about whether she should apply for a job as a full-time organizer
given her impending marriage to Tom Hayden, leader of the Students for
a Democratic Society (SDS). Baker's answer was an unfaltering yes.
Years later, after Hayden's marriage had ended and other problems set in,
Ella was there for Casey once again, bolstering her confidence that she
could make it on her own. “Ella got me through that period” with many
late-night conversations, Casey recalled years later with great emotion
and affection.42
Similarly, Prathia Hall, a seminary student and Southwest Georgia
field secretary for SNCC, confided her marriage plans to Baker and
worried about how her independence might be compromised if she were
to become someone's wife. In turn, Baker shared with Hall something
she shared with very few people: her own difficulties with juggling
marriage and politics. Baker did not, however, encourage Hall to follow
the path she herself had taken—ultimately choosing politics over
domesticity—but simply warned her about what problems she might
anticipate.43
Some young women did not fully appreciate the impact Baker had on
their lives in these formative years until much later. When Barbara Jones
(Omolade)—now a successful teacher, writer, and feminist activist—
began to analyze the gender politics within the movement twenty years
after SNCC'S demise, she immediately thought of Ella Baker as a radical
model of black womanhood.44 Baker was independent, a “social theorist
and an intellectual,” a no-nonsense person who could hold her own in
any situation and commanded respect from those around her. This model
of a confidant, committed, and savvy black woman was one that many of
the young women whose lives Baker touched would strive to emulate.45
Eleanor Holmes Norton, who met Baker when she was in her early
twenties and fresh out of Yale law school, remembered Baker as “a
woman who seemed unintimidated by the fact that she was a woman in a
movement led by men. She was just very smart. And she wasn't afraid to
be a smart woman.” Baker never called herself a feminist. She could not
have, Norton insists—“there wasn't any such animal then.” At the same
time, “Ella Baker performed and acted as a feminist.” She operated with
confidence, intelligence, and authority, and consequently “she was not
treated as a woman. She was treated as one of the most talented people in
the room.” Ella Baker was not a feminist per se. That is, she did not use
or embrace the term. But, through her actions and what her work
represented, she could safely be called what Joy James refers to as
“profeminist,” someone who is a strong advocate of gender equality and
liberatory concepts of manhood and womanhood, without a selfconscious investment in the term “feminist” or its attendant theories.46
In a sense, Ella Baker simply ignored conventional gender mandates.
As a result, in some contexts, she was not treated the way other women
were treated, even by men who held sexist views on the proper place of
women. She was so savvy and had so many of the skills and insights the
movement needed that her gender was sometimes “overlooked,” if only
to exploit her talents. She was at certain moments seemingly able to
negotiate an exemption from the existing confines of patriarchal gender
roles. But there was also a limit to the sexual neutrality she was afforded.
There were many times when her gender became quite important and she
was reminded that she had overstepped the bounds. Baker's role was
somewhat unique: because of her skills, experience, and knowledge of an
organization's inner workings—as in the case of the NAACP or SCLC—she
was allowed to sit at the table but was rarely dealt into the game. As her
friend Septima Clark observed, these insulting reminders infuriated
Baker.47 Most of the time, however, Baker was able to navigate the
bumpy gender terrain of the Black Freedom Movement and make
significant contributions anyway. She developed strategies to insulate
herself and minimize the psychological damage. Such strategies
understandably took a toll.48
SITUATIONAL DEMOCRACY AND
HUMANISTIC PRACTICE
Baker's emphasis on grassroots participatory democracy stemmed from
her realization that the forces being mobilized by SNCC in the 1960s were
potentially some of the most radical in the nation. Her philosophy was
not simply to “let the people decide,” as the popular SNCC and SDS slogan
suggested. Rather, it was to let the disenfranchised vote, let the silenced
be heard, let the oppressed be empowered, and let the marginalized move
to the center.49 The distinction is an important one. In other words, she
was not advocating a simple populist formula of majority rule or “one
person, one vote,” a paradigm that, as the work of the legal scholar Lani
Guinier illustrates, is sorely limiting and essentially unfair in certain
situations. Democracy, for Ella Baker, was about fairness and inclusion,
not sheer numbers. Therefore, democratic practice could never be
formulaic but rather had to revolve around real participation and
deliberation. It was given meaning by the specific situation or historical
moment in which it was tested. In their book on race and democracy, The
Miner's Canary, Guinier and Gerald Torres argue that in order to realize
a more meaningful and inclusive democracy we must “disrupt certain
habits of individual thought or self-defeating rituals, while introducing
new possibilities for reciprocity, collaboration, problem solving,
networking and innovation. To do this, [a] community needs the capacity
to confront embedded hierarchies and to engage with the untidiness of
conflict over time.”50 Such a view very closely resembles Baker's.
Embracing this radical approach of situational democracy meant
Baker had to constantly assess and reassess the power dynamics in any
given situation and then tilt the leadership scales in the direction of the
least powerful. For example, Baker's shifting posture within the
movement reflected her understanding of the power dynamics in each
new organizational setting she found herself in. She had a greater degree
of authority and influence in SNCC than she had ever had before, but,
instead of exercising it forcefully, she relented and exercised her power
lightly and subtly. She could have intimidated and dominated, as certain
leaders had attempted to overpower and dominate her, but she did not.
She took precisely the opposite approach.
Ella Baker's vision of radical democracy was a profoundly historical
concept, based on the idea that in order to achieve democratic ideals one
first had to assess the specific historical parameters of exclusion,
especially racism, sexism, and class exploitation. It is important to note
that Baker would have been the last to argue the conservative colorblind
argument with regard to race and inequality.51 Her conviction was that
previously oppressive practices had to be radically reversed, not simply
halted—those with racial, class, and gender privileges had to relinquish
them, and corrective measures had to be put into place. This was as true
within the movement as it was in the larger society. And this explains
what may have appeared to be an inverted social hierarchy within SNCC.
Black leadership had to be emphasized and poor people's voices
amplified because in absolutely every other facet of social life the
opposite pressures and privileges were in force.
The challenge of a radical democratic practice was both a personal
and an organizational one. Group relations had to be reorganized, but
individuals had to grapple with personal changes as well. The process of
building a movement for social transformation had to allow for,
encourage, and nurture the transformation of the human beings involved.
Individuals had to rethink and redefine their most intimate personal
relations and their identities. Activists could not simply “ape the
insiders,” Baker insisted.52 Social change organizations could not
replicate the cold impersonalism of the market-driven dominant culture.
Personal relations were key building blocks for a new, more humane
social order and for a successful revolutionary movement. It is in this
sense that Ella Baker was a humanist. While she bemoaned the fact that
“our whole society has been built to a large extent upon the ascendancy
of the individual, of individual leadership,” she also celebrated the
importance and dignity of each person.53 She saw value and a complex
beauty in human beings, despite all their imperfections. She embraced
“the concept that … all contacts with people, if you are interested in
people, can be valuable.”54
It was her contention that the political was inherently personal long
before it was a slogan for Second Wave feminism. Just as teachers had to
know their students, organizers had to know their communities, and
comrades had to know one another and treat one another decently.
Movement leaders could not condemn hierarchy, elitism, and
impersonalism in the society and emulate those same values in their own
work and personal interactions. “Anytime you continue to carry on the
same kind of organization that you say you are fighting against, you can't
prove to me that you have made any change in your thinking,” Baker
observed in an interview in the 1970s.55 Activists could not make
themselves feel more important by disparaging and “tyrannizing over
others.” Baker went on to explain: “As we begin to grow in our own
strength and as we flex our muscles of leadership, we can begin to feel
that the other fellow should come through us. But this is not the way to
create a new world … [which] requires understanding that human beings
are human beings.”56
Ella Baker's political praxis—the combination of her theory and
practice—reflected what political scientists describe as a deliberative
model. Interaction, discussion, debate, and consensus building were key
components of that praxis. In contrast, voting, lobbying the corridors of
power, and getting favored candidates elected were secondary
considerations. Once people were in motion in a committed and
sustained mass struggle, Baker felt that access to legislators and media
would follow. “If you are involved with people and organizing them as a
force, you didn't have to go and seek out the establishment people. They
would seek you out,” she insisted, explaining that politicians had passed
numerous laws over time with little impact on people's daily lives until
the people themselves decided to make implementation of those laws
real and meaningful.57 Southern black youth could have petitioned the
president and the attorney general ad nauseam without a reply before
February 1, 1960. But once they were engaged in a set of protests that
disrupted business as usual, government officials in Washington were
ready to listen.58 For Baker, elections, court decisions, and even
legislative victories were the events that punctuated the real ongoing
political process, which consisted of a discursive exchange, the building
of a set of trusting relationships, individual and organizational, the
transmission of skills and confidence, and the forging of a shared
democratic vision for the future. That was the meat of political work for
Ella Baker. The rest was extra.59 This political orientation put Baker on
the ideological margins of the predominantly male black political
leadership circle and mainstream civil rights organizations. Still she
located herself at the center of grassroots struggles.
THE OUTSIDER WITHIN
The concept of the “outsider within,” a person who functions in close
proximity those in power but who is never given official recognition as a
member of the club, is a useful way to understand one aspect of Ella
Baker's complex and unique political career.60 The “outsider within” has
the benefit of observation up close, but she is still not an authentic
member of the inner circle in terms of actual power, access to resources,
or social status within the group. Baker knew and worked with some of
the most powerful black male political leaders of the twentieth century:
A. Philip Randolph, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, Thurgood
Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr. She knew them all, but she was
never really what SCLC minister Ralph Abernathy's wife, Juanita,
perceived her as being, which was “one of the boys.”61 In contrast, Baker
consistently described herself as operating on the periphery of respected
black leadership circles.
Baker was an “outsider within” the national leadership of several
major civil rights organizations, with direct access to a host of powerful
male leaders, yet she consciously compromised her insider status by
speaking her mind forcefully, because in her words, she had “no capacity
for worshipping the leader.”62 The inescapable fact that she was a
woman amid a decidedly male political elite only compounded her
difficulties. She was not a team player because she often contested the
rules of the game, which angered and annoyed many male organizers and
some women. Still, it would be wrong to assume that this status rendered
her powerless. She had real power and real influence, largely because she
secured it for herself. She insinuated herself into situations where others
thought she did not belong, speaking out in a way that some thought she
should not. She built up a loyal network of local allies that gave her
some protection from possible capricious actions on the part of her
“superiors.” Baker was an outsider, in part, because of circumstance and
in part because of her own political choice and agency. She knew that
sexist traditions limited her ability to function as a top leader. However,
her own political views, as they evolved, brought her to the conclusion
that she did not want to function in that capacity, as it was construed, and
she was critical of those who did. At the same time that Baker developed
a strategy for navigating the undemocratic structures and practices that
threatened to keep her and others at the margins of national black
political leadership, she fought to transform the structural pillars of
elitism within the Black Freedom Movement into something more
democratic. Historian Darlene Clark Hine observes that “African
American women had to create a patchwork of identities just to get
through most days.”63 Baker certainly had to maintain a variety of public
and private identities in order to carry out the work that she did in
different venues and in disparate political and social climates. There
were times when she was a quiet, dutiful “worker in the vineyards,” as
her mother's missionary group would have said. At other times, she was
a bold and formidable presence, motivating some and challenging and
confronting others.
For much of her adult political life, Ella Baker was a socialist without
a party or a party line. As a friend of hers, the author and filmmaker
Joanne Grant, observed, Baker was not often explicit about her socialist
beliefs, but there were times when she was as straightforward as one
could be. “The only society that can serve the needs of large masses of
poor people is a Socialist society,” she declared in a 1977 interview.64
She was a harsh critic of capitalism, but resisted any hints of
sectarianism or ideological orthodoxy. She loathed dogma of any kind
and was openly critical when she observed this kind of rigid thinking on
the part of friends and colleagues. Her own worldview was constructed
from an amalgam of different ideologies and traditions, combining the
black Baptist missionary values of charity, humility, and service with the
economic theories of Marxists and socialists of various stripes who
advocated a redistribution of wealth. She also embraced the militant selfdefense tradition of the black South. Her affiliation with the openly
socialist Mass Party Organizing Committee (MPOC) and her defense of
Communist Party member Angela Davis are further indicators of her
unequivocal identification with the left by the 1970s. She had become
her own unique kind of revolutionary.
For Baker, revolution was above all about a protracted and layered
democratic process. The journey was as important as the destination. In
the final analysis, Baker's political philosophy was undergirded by a
deep and profound sense of connection to and love of humanity. This
spirit of radical humanism, with its embedded understanding and
appreciation of the human process of struggle, is also reflected in the life
and writings of the Caribbean-born socialist C. L. R. James.65 In the
following words, James summed up much of his view of revolutionary
transformation and his sensitivity to the human characters that are the
agents of that change: “A revolution is first and foremost a movement
from the old to the new, and needs above all new words, new verse, new
passwords—all the symbols in which ideas and feelings are made
tangible. The mass creation and appropriation of what is needed is a
revealing picture of a whole people on their journey into the modern
world, sometimes pathetic, sometimes vastly comic, ranging from the
sublime to the ridiculous, but always vibrant with the life that only a
mass of ordinary people can give.”66 Baker lived her life engaged in
political struggle and forged relationships and sustained organizations as
if she believed precisely what James's statement conveys.
In trying to delineate Ella Baker's life and harness and distill it in wellordered chapters, I felt her resistance. There was an elegant fluidity
about her life that proved to be both the source of her amazing
“presence” and, at times, a biographer's nightmare. In looking back on
the semi-coherence of a life lived, one is humbly reminded that life is an
art and not a science. In eavesdropping on Ella Baker's life story, I found
parts of it that made a visceral impact and simply could not be poured
adequately into words. As I sought advice from friends, relatives, and
colleagues who knew Ella Baker or had themselves researched her life, I
was repeatedly reminded that “she was bigger than that” and that no term
or label quite captured her. She was forever shrugging off every
definitional shawl I tried to gently drape over her shoulders. She really
lived outside categories and labels, as difficult as that is for some
academics to accept. And yet she was still an intellectual with a very
coherent, although dynamic, worldview. As my jazz-aficionado husband
would say, like Duke Ellington she was “beyond category.” Still, going
back to the beginning of my story of her life, she was both a self-made
woman and a product of the world, country, culture, and ideas that
surrounded her. In celebrating her life, I do not want to mystify or
circumscribe it. While, as my son constantly reminds me, we are all
products of the multitude of experiences, influences, and stimuli that
touch us as we struggle to formulate ideas and identities, those
experiences are the raw material we then mold into our own unique
form. So, trying to sum up and repackage a life full of detours, depth,
and contradictions is like trying to hold water in your hands. You can
feel it, but you can't quite contain it.
Some metaphors and comparisons are better than others for trying to
convey a sense of what Ella Baker's life was all about. In an eloquent
eulogy given at a SNCC reunion in 2000 in Raleigh, North Carolina,
Timothy Jenkins, a former SNCC member and a national student leader in
the 1960s, described Ella Baker as the “mortar between the bricks”
holding different sectors of the movement together with a tacit strength
that was indispensable but almost invisible. I love Timothy Jenkins's
metaphor, but for me it is still not quite right—too hard, too harsh,
perhaps. For me, in looking back at Baker's life in all of its rich
complexity, I am reminded of the eclectic crazy quilt that has hung on
my wall since I began this project and is of the same generation as Ella
Baker. It reminds me of how she patched together her worldview from
the ideological fragments in her repertoire, binding together seemingly
mismatched theories and traditions, stitching it all together into
something both functional and utterly amazing. The patchwork quilt
reminds me of how Baker served the movement: identifying the value in
people who were raggedy, worn, and a little bit tattered—people who
were seen by some as the scraps, the remnants, the discarded ones. In
each one, as in each strip of fabric, Ella Baker saw enormous beauty and
potential. And, like the quilting tradition itself, her life's work was
collective work. She understood the labor-intensive process required to
stitch together all the tiny pieces and hold them in place. She knew it
could not be done alone and required the skill, trust, and commitment of
a team of quilters. Ella Baker's legacy then is a collective legacy, bound
up with the work of the Pauli Murrays, the Lucille Blacks, the Septima
Clarks, the Fannie Lou Hamers, the Amzie Moores, the Bob Moseses,
and the Anne Bradens of the world and many more. She has not left us a
manifesto, perhaps quite deliberately so. Manifestos make us lazy.
Rather, she has left us a warm and complex work of art, a reminder of a
process, a way of working and living, a way of looking at that which
may seem of little value and finding its enormous transformative power.
APPENDIX
ELLA BAKER'S ORGANIZATIONAL
AFFILIATIONS, 1927–1986
(A Partial List)
Ad Hoc Committee on the Sunflower (County) Elections, 1960s
American Labor Party, 1930s
American League against War and Fascism, 1930s
Americans for Traditional Liberties, 1950s
Angela Davis Defense Committee, 1970s
Aubrey Williams Foundation, 1968
Charter Group for a Pledge of Conscience, 1970s
Coalition of Concerned Black Americans, 1970s
Committee to Defend the Harlem Five, 1970s
Fund for Educational and Legal Defense, 1960s-1970s
Harlem Branch Library, Young People's Forum, 1930s
Harlem's Own Cooperative Inc., 1930s
Highlander Folk School, 1950s-1960s
Independent Black Voters' League, 1970s
In Friendship, 1950s
Jeannette Rankin Brigade, 1968–1969
Liberal Party, 1950s
Mass Party Organizing Committee, 1970s
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1960s
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1940s1950s
National Association of Consumers, 1940s
National Committee to Abolish HUAC, 1950s
National Sharecroppers Fund, 1960s-1970s
National Urban League, 1930s
New York Public Schools Intergroup Committee, 1950s
Operation Freedom, 1960s
Parents in Action, 1950s
Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 1957
Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee, 1970s
Rand School, 1930s
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1950s
Southern Conference Education Fund, 1960s
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960s
Third World Women's Alliance, 1970s
Volunteer Civil Rights Commissions, 1950s
We Care, 1960s
Women's Emergency Coalition, 1960s
Works Progress Administration Workers Education Project, 1930s
World Fair Boosters and Friends of Africa, 1934
Young Negroes' Cooperative League, 1930s
Young Women's Christian Association, Harlem Branch, 1930s
Youth Committee of One Hundred against Lynching, 1930s
YWCA
Regional Committee on Human Relations, 1960s
NOTES
NOTE ON PRIMARY SOURCES
The Ella Baker Papers (EBP) cited here are housed at the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, which is part of the New York
Public Library system, Harlem, New York. It consists of nine boxes of
documents and correspondence. Unfortunately, at the time this book is
going to press, the papers are still being processed and cataloged, and are
not open to the public. I have viewed these papers in their entirety and
consulted with the curator of the collection about how they will be
organized for purposes of citation. I have indicated as clearly as possible
where other researchers can find the documents referenced here. The
collection will be organized chronologically, with a separate
correspondence file that will contain letters not directly associated with a
major organization or campaign. There will also likely be two separate
files, one of Ella Baker's writings (which will be small) and another
miscellaneous file containing documents and newspaper clippings that
Baker collected pertaining to events and activities that she herself was
not directly involved in. In addition, my own collection of approximately
ten boxes of materials pertaining to Ella Baker's life and collected during
the course of my research—some of which overlaps with the contents of
the EBP—will be cataloged and deposited at the Schomburg for
reference by other researchers.
Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I petitioned the
U.S. Department of Justice to obtain Ella Baker's FBI files, which date
from the 1940s through the 1970s. There are three distinct files: Atlanta
(file no. 100–5837), New York (file no. 100–136886), and Headquarters
(file no. HQ 100–430167). In the notes they will simply be referred to as
“Ella Baker's FBI files” with the relevant location. Unfortunately, these
files are not a reliable source of empirical information. There are
numerous factual inaccuracies in them, ranging from the wrong birthdate
to a misidentification by one agent of Ella Baker's husband as her cousin.
The most useful function these declassified government documents seem
to serve is as a convenient file of clippings showing the coverage of
Baker's various affiliations and speaking appearances. I have not relied
on this material for any information that is not verifiable elsewhere
without offering qualifiers or disclaimers.
INTRODUCTION
The epigraph introducing this book appears as an addendum to Joanne
Grant's Ella Baker. As it happens, Robert Moses and Charles Cobb chose
the same epigraph to introduce their book Radical Equations. Initially, I
worried about using the very same words for an introductory statement.
But then I realized that Moses, Cobb, and Grant, all of whom worked
closely with Ella Baker in the heyday of SNCC, had selected a quotation
that best represented her philosophy and politics. That being the case, it
seemed altogether appropriate to highlight again the remarks about
radicalism that Baker made in 1969.
1. Evans, Personal Politics; Mueller, “Ella Baker and the Origins of
‘Participatory Democracy’”; Omolade, interview by author; Holmes
Norton, interview by author.
2. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women:
Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in Hine Sight, 37.
3. Ibid., 43.
4. Kochiyama, telephone interview by author.
5. Joyce Ladner made this observation about Baker at the SNCC
reunion at Shaw University, Raleigh, N.C, Apr. 2000.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Giddings, interview by author.
2. Census records and transcribed interviews vary in the spelling of
Ella Baker's paternal grandfather's name, with some identifying him as
“Teemer” and others “Teema.”
3. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 13.
4. Minutes of the Thirteenth Annual Session of the Women's
Auxiliary Progressive Baptist Convention of North Carolina, Elizabeth
City, N.C., Oct. 29-Nov. 1, 1931, North Carolina Collection (NC
Collection), Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
5.
5. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow. For more discussion of how black
women negotiated race, class, and gender identities in this period, see
Perkins, “The Impact of the ‘Culture of True Womanhood' on the
Education of Black Women”; Gaines, Uplifting the Race; and Shaw,
What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do.
6. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 91. Shaw argues
that, despite some elitist underpinnings, black middle-class women
formed an identity that included service to those less fortunate, even
when providing such service involved some seemingly unfeminine
behavior by conventional standards. She further argues that the black
community's expectation of public works by women undermined the cult
of true womanhood's emphasis on domesticity. The emphasis on
humility undermined class snobbery toward the black poor.
7. Baker, interview by Hogan, 15.
8. Minutes of the Thirteenth Annual Session of the Woman's
Auxiliary Progressive Baptist Convention, 7.
9. Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 12.
10. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 26, 28.
11. U.S. Census Population Schedule, North Carolina, 1870 and
1880.
12. Warren County Sunday School Convention proceedings, July 14,
1926, bulletin no. 82, NC Collection.
13. Baker, interview by Hogan, 14.
14. Ibid., 14-15.
15. Minutes of the Thirteenth Annual Session of the Woman's
Auxiliary Progressive Baptist Convention, 4. These were the only extant
minutes I could locate with Anna Ross Baker's name in them. Even
though Baker was a young adult in 1931, all of her interview accounts
suggest that the missionary work her mother did in the 1930s was a
continuation of the same kind of work she had done when Ella Baker
was a child. So, I am inferring that these service projects are
representative examples of earlier work. Note that on p. 5 of the minutes
the session is described as the fourteenth annual session. It is unclear
whether the gathering was the thirteenth or the fourteenth, but all other
information is consistent.
16. Baker, interview by Hogan, 15.
17. See Salem, To Better Our World, and Bekeley, ‘Colored Ladies
Also Contributed.’
18. See Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 13-18, 221–229; and
Gilmore, Genderand Jim Crow, for further discussion of the political and
community service intervention of middle-class black women in the
South in the early 1900s.
19. Minutes of the Thirteenth Annual Session of the Women's
Auxiliary Progressive Baptist Convention, 13.
20. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 120-21.
21. “Lifting as we climb” was the motto of the National Association
of Colored Women, formed in 1896. See Giddings, When and Where I
Enter, 93-98.
22. There is a very lively debate in the literature about the nature of
class, leadership, and respectability among African Americans in the
early 1900s. Shaw argues for the sense of obligation black middle class
women felt for the masses of black folk. Despite some elitism, she
contends, social status was actually dependent on social responsibility to
the community. This relationship was underwritten by the close
proximity and shared racial discrimination faced by all blacks regardless
of class. Gaines and Higginbotham place greater emphasis on the ways
in which the black middle class policed the moral behavior of the poor
and earned benefits as a result. Gilmore sees the politics of respectability
as a shrewd strategy by middle-class blacks to win reform victories for
the entire community.
23. See Gaines, Uplifting the Race, for further discussion of the limits
and contradictions of “uplift” ideology that privileged black middle-class
male leadership and inadvertently reinforced antiblack racism. Also see
Frankel and Dye, Gender, Class, Race, and Reform.
24. Burroughs quoted in Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 208.
25. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 59.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 60.
28. For more evidence of middle-class black women's belief in the
compatibility of successful private and public lives in the first quarter of
the twentieth century, see Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and To Do,
and Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow.
29. Minutes of the Thirteenth Annual Session of the Woman's
Auxiliary Progressive Baptist Convention, 7.
30. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 59.
31. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 119.
32. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 26.
33. Baker, interview by Hogan, 86.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 82, 85. The term “precise-spoken” is from Baker, interview
by Hayden and Thrasher, 9.
36. Baker, interview by Boyte, 4.
37. Baker, interview by Hogan, 86.
38. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 22.
39. Ibid., 22.
40. Ibid., 23.
41. Ibid., 22.
42. Ibid., 22-23.
43. U.S. Census Population Schedule, Norfolk City, Virginia, 1900,
Norfolk Public Library, Norfolk, Va. This census schedule lists the year
of marriage.
44. Du Bois, “Forethought,” in The Souls of Black Folk, 34. Du Bois
first made this famous statement in his address to the first Pan-African
conference, held in London in July 1900.
45. Ella Baker's maternal family was from Littleton, N.C., which is
now a part of Warren County; however, Littleton was formerly a part of
both Warren and adjacent Halifax Counties.
46. U.S. Census Population Schedule, North Carolina, 1900 and
1910. This census listed whether respondents could read or write and
whether they owned or rented land.
47. Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie attacked
the snobbery and selfish attitudes of privileged African Americans.
However, Baker's family does not fit his profile.
48. Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, University of Virginia
Library. Richmond City had a larger population, with 85,050. U.S.
Historical Census Data Browser, (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census).
49. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interest, 10.
50. Ibid., 22-23.
51. “Judge Fines Insolent Negro $25,” Norfolk Landmark, July 8,
1910, 2.
52. For more information on Jim Crow and segregation, see Chafe et
al., Remembering Jim Crow; Dailey et al., Jumpin' Jim Crow; and
Perman, Struggle for Mastery.
53. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interest, 21-22. Black
disenfranchisement was not the sole intent of the redistricting in Norfolk,
but it was the net result.
54. “Fourth Ends in Turmoil of Riot,” Norfolk Landmark, July 5,
1910, 1. For details on antiblack violence after the Jack Johnson fight,
see Roberts, Papa Jack.
55. Norfolk City Directory, 1895-96, Norfolk Collection, Norfolk
Public Library, Norfolk, Va., 93.
56. Norfolk City Directory, 1897, 565.
57. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 6.
58. Norfolk City Directory, 1897, 565, and 1900, 749.
59. Norfolk City Directory, 1910, 740.
60. Ibid.
61. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 11.
62. Baker, interview by Hogan, 11. The transcript says, “I don't think
it was Dennis Austin—was tall and very black …” I think there was an
error in the transcription from the audio, since census records indicate
that Dennis Alston of North Carolina was a neighbor of the Bakers in
Norfolk and otherwise fits Ella Baker's description. He is likely the
person she is referring to as the Black Money King. See also Norfolk
City Directory, 1910, 740, and Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher,
14.
63. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 14.
64. Baker, interview by Hogan, 10-11.
65. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 2.
66. Baker, interview by Hogan, 81.
67. Ibid., 81-82.
68. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 8.
69. Ibid., 12.
70. Ibid., 11.
71. Ibid., 16.
72. Ibid., 12.
73. Ibid., 21.
74. Norfolk City Directory, 1908, 1217.
75. “Fourth Ends in Turmoil of Riot,” Norfolk Landmark, July 5,
1910, 1.
76. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 21.
77. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 58-60; Baker, interview by
Hogan, 14-16, 86-89; Baker, interviewer not known, Duke University
Oral History Program (DUOHP), Durham, N.C., 8.
78. Warren County Register of Deeds, Warrenton, N.C., 1888; and
Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 19.
79. Baker, interview by Britton, 2-3; Warren Co. Register of Deeds,
1888.
80. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 2, 24.
81. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 57.
82. Baker, interviewer not known, DUOHP, 4-9.
83. Newell, interview by author; “Our Colored People,” Littleton
News Reporter, June 18, 1897, 5.
84. Newell, interview by author. Jenny Newell was a classmate and
neighbor of Ella Baker in the 1910s.
85. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 21.
86. On Maggie, see Solomon, interview by author. On Blake Curtis,
see U.S. Census Population Schedule, North Carolina Census, 1920, v.
42, ED 138, sheet 19, line 11.
87. Solomon, interview by author. Maude Solomon was a neighbor of
the Baker family and a friend of Ella Baker's younger sister in the 1910s
and 1920s.
88. Newell, interview by author.
89. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, 129; also Jaynes, Branches
without Roots.
90. Ella Baker, interview by Morris, 17A.
91. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 16-17.
92. Baker, interview by Morris, 13A; the “tomboy” reference is from
Baker, interview by Hogan, 89.
93. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 11-13, 16; Baker,
interviewer not known, DUOHP, 1.
94. Baker, interview by Hogan, 86.
95. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 16.
96. Baker, interview by Hogan, 86.
97. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 8.
98. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 73.
99. Baker, interview by Morris, 12A.
100. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 15.
101. Ibid., 25. For more on class and preaching styles see, Wheeler,
Uplifting the Race.
102. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 14.
103. Baker, interview by Morris, 12A.
104. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 57.
105. Ibid., 5, 61; Gilchrist, interview by author.
106. Warren County Register of Deeds, 1888.
107. North Carolina Real Estate Index for Warren County, 1888, book
53, 625, N.C. State Archives, Raleigh, N.C.; 1889, book 54, 156; 1890,
book 54, 848.
108. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 61.
109. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 61.
110. Baker, interview by Hogan, 74.
111. Charles Payne, “Ella Baker and Models of Social Change.”
112. Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 2-5.
113. Ibid., 5. For more on African Americans in North Carolina
politics during this period, see Helen Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion
Politics in North Carolina; Ray Gavins, “Black Leadership in North
Carolina to 1900.”
114. Baker's childhood memories are documented in nine in-depth
personal interviews conducted with her by various researchers between
1968 and 1981.
115. Baker, interview by Boyte, 3.
116. Ibid., 3-4.
117. Newell, interview by author; Solomon, interview by author.
118. Escott, “White Republicanism and Ku Klux Klan Terror,” 29;
Williamson, A Rage for Order, 128-33.
119.Littleton Courier, Sept. 1, 1892, 4.
120.Littleton News Reporter, Aug. 16, 1897, 2, column by Bill Arp.
121.Littleton News Reporter, June 4, 1897, 5. The mid-1890s were
marked by widespread economic hardship.
122. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 60.
123. Solomon, interview by author.
124. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 20.
125. Ibid., 10.
126. Solomon, interview by author.
127. Ibid.
128. For discussions on the class politics within the African American
community in the South in the early 1900s, see Gatewood, Aristocrats of
Color.
129. Baker, interview by Hogan, 79-80.
130. Blake Baker's Estate, Warren County Estates Records, 1831.
Blake Baker's will lists Temer Baker as property to be distributed to his
heirs.
131. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 60.
132. Ibid., 58.
133. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 25.
134. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 73.
135. Gilchrist, interview by author.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Baker, interviewer not known, Duke University Oral History
Program (DUOHP), Durham, N.C., 5.
2. Baker, interview by Britton, 1-2. This additional year of schooling
explains why Ella Baker was slightly older than her classmates upon
graduation in 1927.
3. Baker, interviewer not known, DUOHP, 5.
4. Ibid., 4; Baker, interview by Hogan, 14.
5. Nash, interview by author, Oct. 1990.
6. Baker, interview by Hogan, 14.
7. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South.
8. Carter, Shaw's Universe, 223.
9. Gutman, “Schools for Freedom,” 260-61.
10. Minutes of the Thirteenth Annual Session of the Women's
Auxiliary Progressive Baptist Convention of North Carolina, Elizabeth
City, N.C., Oct. 29-Nov. 1, 1931, North Carolina Collection, Wilson
Library, University of North Carolina.
11. Baker, interview by Hogan, 82.
12. Carter, Shaw's Universe, 5, 225.
13. Ibid., iv.
14. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 24042; Goggin, Carter G. Woodson.
15. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 187.
16. Catalogue and Announcements of Shaw University, session of
1927–1928, North Carolina Collection (NC Collection), Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Absences from religious
services could result in loss of scholarships and honors.
17. “Shaw University,” pamphlet, 1945, Shaw University Archives
(SUA), Raleigh, N.C., 6.
18. Baker, interview by Hogan, 76.
19. Ibid., 85.
20. Ibid., 82.
21.Shaw University Journal, Nov. 1925, box 59, 4, SUA.
22. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 24-28.
23. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race,
549. Also see Abrahams, “Negotiating Respect.” Although Du Bois
popularized the phrase “the talented tenth” beginning in 1903, it was
coined by Henry Morehouse, executive secretary of the American
Baptist Home Mission Society from 1897 to 1893 and from 1902 to
1917. See Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 20, 25.
24. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 25-27.
25. Ibid., 20.
26. Sundquist, The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, 10.
27. Carter, Shaw's Universe, 139.
28. Catalogue and Announcements of Shaw University, session of
1926–1927, 16, NC Collection.
29. Carter, Shaw's Universe, 49.
30. Shaw University Faculty Council Minutes, Jan. 26, 1925, and
Apr. 22, 1925, box 146, SUA.
31. Carter, Shaw's Universe, 139-40.
32.Shaw University Bulletin, 1922, 14, NC Collection.
33. Catalogue and Announcements of Shaw University, session of
1926–1927, 16. This training might have prepared young women to work
as domestic servants. However, Shaw apparently presumed that women
would perform such work on behalf of their own families. Similar work
requirements were common at elite private colleges for white women
during this time. Of course, having students do this work also saved
money.
34. For further discussion of contemporary ideas regarding black
women's domestic responsibilities and their professional and public
roles, see Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do.
35. Yergan, interview by author. Effie Yergen is a cousin of Max
Yergan, the famous Shaw alumnus, missionary, and later political
associate of Paul Robeson.
36. Ibid., 3.
37. Shaw University Faculty Council Minutes, Feb. 12, 1925, box 22,
5, SUA.
38. Carter, Shaw's Universe, 139-40.
39. Catalogue and Announcements of Shaw University, session of
1927–1928, 16.
40. Carter, Shaw's Universe, 139-40. For a discussion of how black
urban working-class leisure activities were negatively viewed by middleclass black leaders, see Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, chaps. titled
“Dancing and Carousing the Night Away” and “Wholesome and Hurtful
Amusements.”
41. Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 294.
42. For more information on black politics during and after World
War I, see Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance.
43. Delany and Delany, Having Our Say, 99.
44. See Ella Baker, “Shaw Valedictorian Speech,” 1927, Ella Baker
Papers (EBP), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New
York, N.Y.; and Ella Baker's high school transcripts, 1918–1923, Shaw
University Registrar, SUA. Copy of transcript in author's possession.
45. Yergan, interview by author.
46. Benjamin Brawley (1882–1939) was the author of ten scholarly
books including A Short History of the American Negro (New York:
Macmillan, 1913); Women of Achievement (Chicago: Woman's American
Baptist Home Mission Society, 1919; Early American Negro Writers
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935); Paul Lawrence
Dunbar, Poet of His People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1936); A New Survey of English Literature: A Text Book for
Colleges (New York: Knopf, 1925); and The Negro in Literature and Art
in the United States (New York: Duffield, 1930).
47. Carter, Shaw's Universe, 216.
48. Ibid., 111.
49. Ibid., 217.
50. Yergan, interview by author.
51. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 64.
52. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 217; Ella Baker to
Brawley, circa 1931, EBP, correspondence files (1930s).
53.Shaw University Journal, Jan. 1924, box 59, SUA.
54.Shaw University Journal, Nov. 1925, box 59, SUA.
55. Ella Baker's Shaw University transcript, Shaw University
Registrar, SUA.
56. Ella Baker's résumé, NAACP Papers, group II, box A572, Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.
57. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 45.
58. Brockington, interview by author, Feb. 1990.
59. See Grant, Ella Baker, 21. Roberts was also known by the name
Robinson.
60. Yergan, interview by author.
61. Carter, Shaw's Universe, 49.
62. Lynch, Black American Radicals and the Liberation of Africa, 1718.
63. Yergan ultimately moved to the far right and repudiated the leftwing ideas he had once embraced; see ibid., 51.
64.Shaw University Bulletin, 1922.
65. Baker, interviewer not known, DUOHP, 5.
66. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 55.
67.Shaw University Journal, Mar. 1925, 5, box 59, SUA.
68. Ibid.
69. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 35.
70. Ibid.
71. Baker, “The Negro Church, the Nucleus of the Negroes' Cultural
Development,” EBP.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Protests against rigid, conservative policies occurred on a number
of southern black college campuses during the decade following World
War I. Shaw experienced comparatively little of this turmoil. See
Wolters, The New Negro on Campus.
75. Baker, interview by Walker, 8.
76.Shaw University Bulletin, 1923, 3.
77. Baker, interview by Hogan, 82.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., 83.
80. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 31.
81. Baker, interview by Hogan, 83.
82. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 30.
83. Catalogue and Announcements of Shaw University, session of
1927–1928.
84. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 31.
85. Ibid.
86. Shaw University Faculty Council minutes, Feb. 1, 1926, box 146,
SUA.
87. Ibid.
88. Ella Baker's Shaw University transcript, Shaw University
Registrar, SUA.
89. Yergan, interview by author, 2.
90. For “inevitable,” see Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher,
37; for “rebellious streak,” see Baker, interviewer not known, DUOHP,
11.
91. Baker, interviewer not known, DUOHP, 12.
92. Ibid., 11.
93. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 37-38.
94. Baker, interview by Britton, 4.
95. “Our Heritage and Its Challenge,” Ella Baker's valedictorian
speech, EBP.
CHAPTER THREE
1. This description of Harlem streets and of Ella Baker's reaction is
drawn from several sources: Baker, interview by Scott; Amsterdam
News, issues from Sept. through Nov. 1927; Naison, Communists in
Harlem; and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue.
2. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 72.
3. Ibid.
4. Baker, interviewer not known, Duke University Oral History
Program (DUOHP), Durham, N.C., 17.
5. Ibid., 5.
6. Telegrams from Roberts (aka Robinson) to Ella Baker, Mar. 6,
1928, June 15, 1936, July 14, 1929, Ella Baker Papers (EBP),
correspondence folder, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
New York, N.Y. No explanation of why Roberts/Robinson was known by
two different surnames can be found.
7. Ibid.
8. Murray, Autobiography of a Black Activist, 75.
9. For studies with a focus on the Great Migration, see Sernett, Bound
for the Promised Land; Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical
Perspective; and Adero, Up South.
10. See Naison, Communists in Harlem, and Turner and Turner,
Richard B. Moore.
11. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 64.
12. Naison, Communists in Harlem, 67-72.
13. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 64. Books that capture
some of the flavor and culture of Harlem in this period include Huggins,
Harlem Renaissance; David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in
Vogue; Clarke, Harlem; Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem; Kirby, Black
Americans in the Roosevelt Era; Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln;
Naison, Communists in Harlem; Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations; and
Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”
14. Baker, interview by Morris, 10A.
15. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 33.
16. Greenberg, “Or Does it Explode?” 76.
17. Ella Baker's valedictorian speech, “Our Heritage and Its
Challenge,” 1927, EBP.
18. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 35.
19. Baker, interview by Scott, 4.
20. Ibid., 5.
21. Lynn, interview by author. This is not to imply that Ella Baker
was a Marxist per se. She was not. However, she functioned at a time
and in a political milieu in which Marxism and other socialist ideas were
taken seriously.
22. Hughes, “My Early Days in Harlem,” 62.
23. Betty Jenkins, “A White Librarian in Black Harlem.”
24. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 93.
25. Baker, interview by Morris, 17A.
26. Ella Baker to Columbus Alston, Young People's Protective
League, Apr. 17, 1936, EBP; and Ella Baker to Columbus Alston, May
10, 1936, EBP.
27. Ella Baker, letter of application to Walter White, Sept. 26, 1938,
NAACP Papers, group II, box A572, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
28. Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, 170.
29. Ella Baker's Experience Sheet, NAACP Papers, group II, box
A572.
30. Ernestine Rose to “Dear Sirs,” June 11, 1940, NAACP Papers,
group II, box A572.
31. Ibid.
32. Murray, Autobiography of a Black Activist, 74-75.
33. Ibid., 75.
34. The descriptions of women in Harlem are drawn from Marvel
Cooke, interview by author; Weisenfeld, African American Women and
Christian Activism; and Greenberg, “Or Does it Explode?” For an
analysis of black women and the YWCA, see Adrienne Lash Jones, “The
Struggle among Saints,” and Hedgeman, The Trumpet Sounds.
35. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load, 17.
36. Pauli Murray to Ella Baker, Dec. 1945; and Pauli Murray to Ella
Baker, Feb. 11, 1961, EBP.
37. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 64.
38. George S. Schuyler, “The Young Negro Co-operative League,”
472.
39. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 92.
40. Ibid.
41. Lynn, interview with author. For more on Brookwood, see
Aktenbaugh, Education for Struggle; Kates, Activist Rhetorics and
American Higher Education; Howlett, Brook-wood Labor College;
Murray, Autobiography of a Black Activist, 105-6.
42. Kates, Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, front
jacket flap.
43. Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle, 10. Joy James, a feminist scholaractivist, has questioned the use of Gramsci's writings on organic
intellectuals to describe Ella Baker. She sees such comparisons as
serving to “deradicalize” Baker and erroneously casting her as a
proponent of vanguard politics rather than of popular democratic politics.
Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth, 86. My reading of both
Gramsci's work and Baker's life leads me to different conclusions.
Gramsci is useful for understanding Baker because he distinguishes
between those who see the source of their knowledge as formal academic
training and those who see their knowledge as arising from practice and
engagement with a community, which is itself seen as a reservoir of
knowledge and analytic insights. In his detailed glossary to his edited
collection of Gramsci's writings, David Forgacs offers the following
useful summary of Gramsci's democratic and nonelitist view of
intellectual work as a part of a revolutionary process: “Gramsci is thus
able to envisage a situation in which, as part of the revolutionary
transformation of society, the intellectual function is massively expanded
—in other words more and more people share the tasks of mental
activity, of organizing, deliberating and leading, both politically and
within the sphere of economic production. For Gramsci, this would also
be a process of democratization and would inhibit the formation of
bureaucracies, which arise precisely where decision-making is
monopolized by a specialized elite of intellectuals.” This description is
consistent with my own reading of Gramsci's writings and with my
understanding of Ella Baker's practice as a nonuniversity-based public
intellectual—and, indeed, with Joy James's description of nonelite
intellectuals. See Forgacs, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 425.
44. Hedgeman, The Trumpet Sounds, 56-57.
45. Baker and Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” 330.
46. The author's interview with Marvel Cooke confirmed that she and
Baker did not have any significant disagreements about the final article.
There were apparently some political disagreements about language and
details that Cooke declined to comment on; it is likely she did not even
remember them after fifty years. Therefore, this article can be analyzed
as an expression of Baker's views without in any way diminishing
Cooke's contribution.
47. See Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; hooks, Feminist Theory
from Margin to Center; and Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire, introduction.
48. Cooke, interview by author.
49. Baker, interview by Scott, 8.
50. See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for
Equality, 539.
51. Floyd J. Calvin, “Schuyler Launches Program to Awaken Race
Consciousness,” Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 7, 1931, 1, 4.
52. Cooke, interview by author.
53. Lynn, interview by author.
54. Baker, interview by Morris, 56A.
55. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 39.
56. Cooke, interview by author.
57. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 40.
58. For discussions of black intellectuals' responses to Jürgen
Habermas's concept of the public sphere, see Black Public Sphere
Collective, The Black Public Sphere, especially the afterword, “Mapping
the Black Public Sphere,” by Thomas C. Holt; also see Banks, Black
Intellectuals.
59. Cooke, interview by author.
60. Calvin, “Schuyler Launches Program,” 1, 4.
61. Schuyler, a onetime socialist turned anarchist, became a staunch
conservative by the end of his life. A rabid anticommunist during the
McCarthy era, he even maintained friendly relations with the racist John
Birch Society, opposed the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Martin Luther
King Jr., and condemned Malcolm X as a “pixilated criminal.” See
Peplow, George S. Schuyler. Also see Schuyler, Black Empire, and
Schuyler, Rac(e)ing to the Right, ed. Leak. The Leak collection covers
Schuyler's conservative views but does not mention much about the
YNCL.
62. Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 143-44. See also
Chateauvert, Marching Together; Harris, Keeping the Faith; Arnesen,
Brotherhoods of Color; Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph.
63. Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 141.
64. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 39.
65. Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 144.
66. Lynn, interview by author.
67. Ibid. Lynn indicated that he never knew Baker to attend church
“or express much interest in religion. She was interested in other ideas.”
68. George Schuyler, “Views and Reviews,” Pittsburgh Courier, May
24, 1930, Nov. 8, 1930.
69. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 40.
70. Baker, interview by Morris, 22A.
71. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 40.
72. I argue elsewhere in the book that Baker supported the idea that
how one behaves as a civilian, so to speak, was related to how one
conducts political organizing work. It was important to be principled and
fair in personal relations as an extension of recreating social relations in
the public sphere.
73. There is a lively ongoing debate among contemporary feminists
and historians about the politics and significance of marital infidelity on
the part of public figures. Baker seems to have viewed Schuyler's sexual
behavior as unprincipled but private. This stance is at variance with
much of her work, which sees the cultivation of personal relationships
and the private behavior of political organizers as critical to their
effectiveness as leaders and their ability to construct a vision of a
transformed society based on a different set of personal values as well as
public policies.
74. Baker, interviewer not known, DUOHP, 29.
75. George Schuyler, “Views and Reviews,” Pittsburgh Courier, Nov.
15, 1930.
76. Ibid.
77. George Schuyler, “The Young Negro Cooperative League,”
Crisis, Jan. 1932, 456.
78. “Schuyler Heads Up League,” Pittsburgh Courier, Oct. 24, 1931,
1, 4.
79. Report of First Conference of YNCL held at Center Avenue
Branch of YMCA in Pittsburgh, Oct. 18, 1931, EBP, YNCL files.
80. Ella Baker, form letter, ca. 1931, EBP, YNCL files.
81. Open letter from Ella Baker to membership of YNCL, Sept. 26.
1932, EBP.
82. George Schuyler, “An Appeal to Young Negroes” (pamphlet
issued by the Young Negroes' Cooperative League), 10, EBP, YNCL
files.
83. Schuyler, “The Young Negro Cooperative League,” 456.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., 472.
86. Ibid., 456.
87. George Schuyler to Mordecai Johnson, Dec. 18, 1931, EBP.
88. Schuyler, “The Young Negro Cooperative League,” 456.
89. Ella Baker, letter to “Irvena,” EBP. The content of the letter
suggests that the date is roughly Dec. 1931. The letter mentions the
Urban League meeting site. A receipt for $2.00, Mar. 2, 1932, from
Urban League for YNCL use of meeting room. EBP.
90. Ella Baker, acting secretary treasurer of YNCL, memo, n.d., EBP,
YNCL files.
91. Ella Baker, letter to John M. Gray, chairman of Committee for
International Negro Youth Conference in Chicago, May 19, 1933, EBP,
YNCL files, correspondence folder.
92. Sam Cantrell, “Consumer Coops,” unpublished article, EBP,
YNCL files.
93. Payne, “Ella Baker and Models of Social Change,” 884.
94. Schuyler, “An Appeal to Young Negroes,” 10.
95. Ella Baker, “Youthful City Workers Turning to Cooperative
Farming,” Amsterdam News, May 11, 1935, 2.
96. George Schuyler, Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 22, 1930.
97. George Schuyler, Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 15, 1930.
98. Ella Baker, untitled article written in Philadelphia, circa Feb. 12,
1940, EBP, Ella Baker Writings file.
99. Ella Baker, interview by Urban Review editors, 23.
100. Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois, 147-48.
101. Ibid., 148.
102. Ibid., 147-49.
103. For biographical information on Divine, see Weisbrot, Father
Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality, and Watts, God, Harlem,
U.S.A.
104. Peplow, George S. Schuyler, 27.
105. Ibid., 117 n. 25.
106. The caption under a front-page photo of Schuyler in the
Pittsburgh Courier, Oct. 17, 1931, reads: “He recently returned from a
six month visit in Europe where he studied intensively the fundamental
principles of the Consumer's Co-operative Societies of Great Britain.”
107. “A Century of Progress” (1932; brochure announcing Chicago
World's Fair), EBP. Baker, interview by Scott, 2, 4-9, 11-13, 19; Clarke,
interview by author; Ella Baker's résumé, NAACP Papers, group II, box
A572; Harlem's Own Cooperative letterhead (blank), EBP, 1930s folder.
108. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 35.
109. Ibid., 55.
110. For information on African Americans and the WPA, see Sitkoff,
A New Deal for Blacks; Sullivan, Days of Hope; Ferguson, Black
Politics in New Deal Atlanta.
111. Murray, Autobiography of a Black Activist, 104.
112. Ibid., 104.
113. Ibid., 90.
114. Lynn, interview by author.
115. Ibid. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire occurred in New York City in
1911 and took the lives of more than 100 immigrant workers, mostly
women, who were trapped in the unsafe building. The tragedy
galvanized public support for safer working conditions.
116. Pauli Murray, to Miss (Isabel) Taylor and Miss (Floria) Pickney,
“Recruiting and Promotion,” Oct. 28, 1938, Murray Papers, WPA files,
box 72, Schlesinger Library, Rad-cliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.
117. Works Progress Administration, Workers Services Division,
NYC reports, 1938-39, Works Progress Administration (WPA) Papers,
box 19, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
118. Ibid.
119. Ella Baker, “A Course in Consumer Education,” prepared for
Worker's Education Project of WPA, WPA Papers, box 18, folder: “New
York, Programs Miscellaneous, 1936–1939.”
120. Works Progress Administration, NYC reports, report for Feb.
1938, WPA Papers, box 19.
121. Pauli Murray, “Report on Worker's Education Exhibit,” Oct. 13,
1938, to Mr. E. Rosenberg, (no title given), 1-3, Murray Papers, WPA
files, box 72.
122. Murray, Autobiography of a Black Activist, 104.
123. Conrad Lynn, There Is a Fountain, 66.
124. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 64.
125. On Oct. 11, 1936, Baker writes D. Mines, stating that she will
meet him at Rand School where she will be attending a lecture. Also, see
letter from Julia Primoff of Women's Afternoon Classes, Rand School, to
Baker, Apr. 30, 1937, EBP, asking her to lecture at the school.
126. Swanson, “Rand School of Social Science.” For more
information, see Cornell, “A History of the Rand School.”
127. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 51-52.
128. Conrad Lynn, There Is a Fountain, 66.
129. Ella Baker, “A Course in Consumer Education,” prepared for
Workers Education Project of WPA, WPA Papers, box 18, folder: “New
York, Programs Miscellaneous, 1936–1939.”
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid.
132. Ibid.
133. Ibid.
134. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 51.
135. A “cell” is a small, tightly knit working group within the larger
pyramid structure of a “democratic centralist” organization like the
Communist Party and many other Communist organizations throughout
the world. What the “cell” does and organizes around could vary
depending on the analysis, “line,” or politics of the larger organization at
any given time. Given the anticommunism of Baker's later political
career, which did not preclude personal relationships or even political
collaborations with Communists, she was likely applauding the form of
the “cell” rather than the content of the CP's political ideology.
136. Lynn, interview by author.
137. Ibid., and Conrad Lynn, There Is a Fountain, 66.
138. Naison, Communists in Harlem, 309.
139. On Lovestone and his faction, see Alexander, The Right
Opposition; Morgan, A Covert Life; and Wald, The New York
Intellectuals, 153-54. The Lovestonites were followers of Russian
socialist Nikolai Bukharin. Later, the faction underwent a major internal
split, and the remaining leadership moved considerably to the right by
the 1950s. Jay Lovestone eventually became a strong CIA supporter and
rabid anticommunist within the right wing of the American labor
movement.
140. Lynn, interview by author; and Clarke, interview by author.
141. Murray, Autobiography of a Black Activist, 103.
142. Solomon, The Cry Was Unity.
143. Ibid., 64-65.
144. Ibid., 75.
145. The Workers (Communist) Party changed its name to the
Communist Party USA in 1929. Bertram Wolfe was a Marxist during the
1930s, but he moved steadily to the right along with Jay Lovestone and
ultimately helped found the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank.
Details taken from Buhle et al., The Encyclopedia of the American Left,
435-37. See also Alexander, The Right Opposition, and Morgan, A
Covert Life.
146. Buhle et al., The Encyclopedia of the American Left, 435-37.
147. Clarke, interview by author.
148. Baker, interview by Morris, 8A.
149. Clarke, interview by author.
150. Lynn, interview by author.
151. Ibid., and Conrad Lynn, There is a Fountain, 68.
152. Lynn, interview by author.
153. Naison, Communists in Harlem, 16.
154. Ibid., 157. See also Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of
Ethiopia, and Solomon, The Cry Was Unity.
155. Baker and Imes collaborated on a number of projects during
these years. See Ella Baker's résumé, NAACP Papers, group II, box
A572, listing Imes as a reference. Invitation to a meeting, June 25, 1935,
co-sponsored by Dunbar Housewives League and Citizens for Fair Play,
listing Imes as a convener, EBP. Also, Baker was in charge of education
and publicity for the Harlem's Own Cooperative, Inc., of which William
Imes was president; there is a letterhead in her papers with her name on
it, EPB.
156. Ella Baker, “Light on a Dark Continent,” EBP, Ella Baker's
Writings file.
157. Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois, 147.
158. Typed essay by Ella Baker, no title, circa Feb. 12, 1940, written
in Philadelphia, Pa., EBP, Ella Baker's Writings file. This essay reads as
if written for a publication, but no published version was located.
159. Baker, interview by Britton, 68.
160. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 12.
161. Ibid., 36-37; Baker, interviewer not known, DUOHP, 19.
162. Ibid.
163. Emma Lance, letter to Ella Baker, circa 1930s, EBP,
correspondence files.
164. Freeman H. Hubbard, letter to Ella Baker, June 8, 1934, EBP,
correspondence files.
165. A series of telegrams from Roberts to Baker dated Oct. 25, 1927,
and Mar. 6, 1928-June 14, 1929, EBP, correspondence files.
166. No record of the marriage could be located, probably because of
the confusion regarding T. J. Roberts/Robinson's last name. Marriage
registries were checked in all of the boroughs of New York, in Warrenton
and Halifax Counties in North Carolina, and in Newark, N.J. It is clear
that Baker and Roberts were legally married, however, because divorce
papers (1958) were located in the Office of the City Clerk in New York.
167. Gilchrist, interview by author.
168. Ella Baker Files, FBI, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.,
NY file, misc. report, Sept. 10, 1941.
169. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 57-58.
170. Bernice Johnson Reagon, telephone interview by author. Jackie
Brockington declined to discuss Bob or the marriage in much detail
because, in her words, “Aunt Ella never wanted to talk about it.”
171. Joyce Ladner, interview with author.
172. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 58.
173. Prathia Hall (Wynn), interview by author.
174. T. J. Roberts, letter to a railway express agency's complaint
department, EBP, correspondence files.
175. Ella Baker, letter to D. J. Philips, President, Consolidated
Tenants League, Inc., Sept. 21, 1945, EBP, correspondence files.
176. In her correspondence with her landlord, Baker
uncharacteristically used her married name, referring to herself as Ella
Roberts, perhaps to avoid complications or questions of marital
legitimacy. See letter from Ella Baker (Roberts) to Roy Zisser, Dophen
Realty Co., Dec. 7, 1955, EBP, correspondence files.
177. Clarke, interview by author.
178. Taitt-Magubane, interview by author.
179. Ibid.
180. Brockington, interview by author.
181. T. J. Roberts, letter in response to a New York Times classified
job advertisement, Jan. 8, 1939, EBP.
182. Ella Baker, letter to League for Mutual Aid, 104 5th Ave., NYC,
Jan. 24, 1940, EBP.
183. Clarke, interview by author.
184. Baker, interview by Britton, 4.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Baker, interview Hayden and Thrasher, 56.
2. Hill, interview by author.
3. For background information on the NAACP, see Tushnet, The
NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education; Ware, William
Hastie; Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching; David
Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race and W. E. B.
DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century; Kellogg,
NAACP; B. Joyce Ross, J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP; and
Walter Francis White, A Man Called White.
4. See Kellogg, NAACP, and Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade
against Lynching. See also Hine et al., The African American Odyssey,
2:484.
5. Baker, interview by Hogan, 27.
6. Rudwick and Meier, “The Rise of the Black Secretariat in the
NAACP.”
7. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race;
Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois; and Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of
W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois later abandoned his talented tenth formula,
embraced Marxism, joined the Communist Party, and died in exile in
Ghana in 1963 at the age of ninety-five.
8. Baker, interview by Britton, 7.
9. Horne, Race Woman.
10. Walter White, letter to “CH,” Feb. 8, 1941, NAACP Papers, group
II, box A572, folder: Ella Baker, staff, 1940–1942, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
11. For information on Daisy Lampkin, see Edna Chappell
McKenzie, “Daisy Lampkin,” in Hine et al., Black Women in America,
1:690-93.
12. C. Herbert Marshall Jr., letter to Walter White, Mar. 24, 1941,
NAACP Papers, group II, box A572, folder: Ella Baker, staff, 1940–
1942.
13. E. Frederic Morrow, branch coordinator, letter to Jerry Gilliam,
Norfolk, Va., Sept. 22, 1941, NAACP Papers, group II, box C307. For
more biographical background on Morrow, see Branch, Parting the
Waters, 180-81.
14. Ella Baker, letters to Roy Wilkins, Mar. 10, 1941; Mar. 21, 1941;
Apr. 11, 1941, NAACP Papers, group II, box A572, folder: Ella Baker,
staff, 1940–1942.
15. Braden, interview by author, Apr. 13, 1991.
16. Williams, Eyes on the Prize, 180.
17. A state law required the group to turn over its membership lists to
authorities and banned it for refusing to do so. NAACP leaders rightly
feared reprisals against its membership if such a list were made public
and did not want to set a precedent for cooperating with this type of
harassment.
18. Ella Baker, letter to Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Green, Apr. 15, 1941,
NAACP Papers, group II, box C307.
19. Baker, interviewer not known, Duke University Oral History
Program (DUOHP), Durham, N.C., 33.
20. Louise B. Gibbs, letter to Ella Baker, July 25, 1944; Baker, letter
to Gibbs, July 27, 1944; Baker, letter to station manager, Union Station,
Washington, D.C., July 27, 1944; NAACP Papers, group II, box A573,
folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1943–1944.
21. Ella Baker, letter to Roy Wilkins, Mar. 20, 1941, NAACP Papers,
group II, box A572, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1940–1955.
22. Ibid.
23. Ella Baker, letter to Roy Wilkins, Mar. 11, 1942, NAACP Papers,
group II, box A572, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1940–1955.
24. Ibid.
25. Baker, interview by Scott, 13.
26. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 72.
27. Ibid., 70.
28. Sacks, Caring By the Hour, 3.
29. Ella Baker to J. M. Tinsley, Apr. 3, 1941, NAACP Papers, group
II, box C301.
30. J. M. Tinsley, letter to Walter White, Apr. 7, 1941, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C210.
31. Baker, interview by Hogan, 43.
32. Ibid., 38-39.
33. J. M. Tinsley, letter to Walter White, June 3, 1941, NAACP
Papers, II, box C210, folder: Virginia State Conference.
34. Report of Dept. of Branches to Board of Directors, May 1941
meeting (n. 6), NAACP Papers, group II, box C390, folder: Monthly
Reports, 1940–1942.
35. Ibid.
36. Baker, interview by Hogan, 21; Baker, interviewer not known,
DUOHP, 19; Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 49-50.
37. Ella Baker, “Report of Dept. of Branches,” May 1941, Board of
Directors Meeting, NAACP Papers, group II, box C390, folder: Monthly
Reports, 1940–1942.
38. Baker, interview by Hogan, 39.
39. Ella Baker, letter to Ruth Tinsley, Richmond, Va., ca. Dec. 1942
or 1943, EBP, NAACP files. The content of the letter suggests it was
written in December of either 1941 or 1942, when Baker was still a field
staff member of the NAACP.
40. Baker, interview by Hogan, 23.
41. Ella Baker, “Report of Dept. of Branches” (report no. 6), Dec.
1941 Board of Directors Meeting, NAACP Papers, group II, box C390,
folder: Monthly Reports, 1940–1942.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, Oct. 4, 1941, NAACP Papers,
group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
46. Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, Feb. 18, 1943, NAACP Papers,
group II, box B98.
47. NAACP Papers, group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
Letters throughout the file illustrate this pattern.
48. Lynn, interview by author. The comment was made to Lynn by
Baker, and he recalled it in precise and convincing detail fifty years later.
49. Ella Baker to “Mr. Green,” Feb. 13, 1948, EBP, mentions that her
husband is hospitalized in North Carolina. Also, see Ella Baker to Lester
Granger, July 10, 1947, EBP.
50. Hill, interview by author.
51. Ibid.
52. Ella Baker, letter to Lucille Black, May 4, 1942, NAACP Papers,
group II, box A572, folder: Ella Baker, staff, 1940–1942.
53. Ella Baker, letter to Lucille Black, May 25, 1942, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
54. Ella Baker, letter to Lucille Black, May 4, 1942, NAACP Papers,
group II, box A572, folder: Ella Baker, staff, 1940–1942.
55. Ella Baker to Lucille Black, Mar. 11, 1942, NAACP Papers,
group II, box A572, folder: Ella Baker, staff, 1940–1942.
56. Baker, interview by Walker, 6.
57. For more information on the politics of respectability in the black
community, see Gaines, Uplifting the Race; Higginbotham, Righteous
Discontent; and Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow.
58. Charlotte Crump, letter to Ella Baker, Oct. 9, 1941, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A572, folder: Ella Baker, staff, 1940–1942.
59. Memos to Charlotte Crump from Walter White, Dec. 19, 1941,
and Jan. 22, 1942, reprimanding her for her performance; memo to
Charlotte Crump from Roy Wilkins, Jan. 10, 1942, also reprimanding
her. NAACP Papers, group II, box A579, folder: Staff, Charlotte Crump.
60. Ella Baker, letter to Roy Wilkins, Apr. 1, 1942, NAACP Papers,
group II, box A572, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1940–1955. “Into Fifth”
refers to the building where the NAACP offices were located.
61. Charlotte Crump, letter to Ella Baker, Mar. 2, 1942; Baker, letter
to Wilkins, Apr. 1, 1942; and Walter White, memo to Ella Baker, Oct.
18, 1941; NAACP Papers, group II, box A572, folder: Staff, Ella Baker,
1940–1955.
62. Ella Baker to Ruby Hurley, June 7, 1944, NAACP Papers, pt. 10,
series B, 1940–1955, reel 16 (microfilm).
63. Ibid.
64. Ruby Hurley to Pauli Murray, July 11, 1945, NAACP Papers, reel
16 (microfilm).
65. One measure of Jackson's elitism and snobbery is the ostentatious
wedding she hosted for her daughter, Juanita, when she married Clarence
Mitchell Jr., a lawyer with the National Urban League. For a detailed
description of the elaborate gala, see Denton L. Watson, Lion in the
Lobby, 117-19.
66. Watson, Lion in the Lobby, 117.
67. Carl Murphy to Walter White, Aug. 9, 1944, and Ella Baker to
Walter White, Oct. 4, 1941, NAACP Papers, group II, box C76; Lillie
Jackson, letter to Walter White, Oct. 19, 1941, NAACP Papers, group II,
box C76.
68. Hill, interview by author.
69. Lillie Jackson, letter to Walter White, Oct. 19, 1941, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C76.
70. Ibid.
71. Roy Wilkins, letter to Walter White, Oct. 21, 1941, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C76.
72. Assistant field secretary report, in Report of the Dept. of
Branches, NAACP Papers, group II, box C390, Monthly Reports folder.
73. Roy Wilkins, letter to Walter White, Oct. 21, 1941, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C76.
74. Ibid.
75. Walter White, letter to Lillie Jackson, Oct. 21, 1941, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C76.
76. Baker, interviewer not known, Duke University Oral History
Program (DUOHP), 33-34. This incident probably took place in 1942, in
either Savannah or New Brunswick, Ga.
77. Ibid., 34.
78. Ibid., 33.
79. Ella Baker, memo to Roy Wilkins, June 1, 1943, NAACP Papers,
group II, B184. See C. E. Bell (Seaboard Railway Company) to W. P.
Bartel (Interstate Commerce Commission), Sept. 14, 1943. Copy in this
file is a carbon sent to Thurgood Marshall (NAACP Legal Defense and
Education Fund), NAACP Papers, group II, B184.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. G. W. Laird (Interstate Commerce Commission) to Thurgood
Marshall, July 28, 1943, NAACP Papers, group II, 184.
84. See Duster, Crusade for Justice, and Giddings, When and Where I
Enter, 22. See also McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled.
85. EBP, NAACP folder.
86. In his biography of Harry Moore, Before His Time, Ben Green
argues that Moore was too independent and militant for the New York
office and was nudged out of leadership shortly before he was killed.
87. Ella Baker files, FBI, Washington, D.C.
88. Ella Baker Files, FBI, Washington, D.C., “Correlation Summary,”
July 19, 1965, 17. This summary cites the speculation about her
instability.
89. Ella Baker, letter to Lucille Black, May 25, 1942, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A572.
90. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 46.
91. Mable Davis of Wise, N.C., letter to Ella Baker, n.d., NAACP
Papers, group II, box C307, General Branch Files, folder: Letters and
Memos, 1940–1942.
92. Gilchrist, interview by author.
93. Ella Baker to Madison Jones, Apr. 1942, NAACP Papers, group
II, A572, 1940–1942, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1941-42; Brockington,
interview with author, Feb. 1990.
94. Rollins, All Is Never Said, 76-77.
95. Ella Baker, memo to Committee on Branches, July 6, 1943,
NAACP Papers, group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
96. Brier et al., Who Built America?, 2:408, 453.
97. Ella Baker, letter to Lucille Black in N.Y., Nov. 2, 1942, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
98. Ibid.
99. Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, Feb. 18, 1943, NAACP Papers,
group II, box B98.
100. Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, Dec. 3, 1942, NAACP Papers,
group II, box B98; and Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, Feb. 18, 1943,
NAACP Papers, group II, box B98.
101. Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, Dec. 3, 1942, NAACP Papers,
group II, box B98, 1-2.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.; and Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, 3 Dec. 1942,
NAACP Papers, group II, box B98, 1-2, and Dec. 18, 1943, NAACP
Papers, group II, box B98.
106. William A. Fowlkes, “U.S. Warned to Make Democracy Work at
Home: Miss Ella Baker Electrifies Jan. 1 Bethel Audience,” Atlanta
Daily World, Jan. 2, 1947, 1.
107. Ella Baker, letter to Lillian Coleman in Fairfield, Ala., Apr. 16,
1941, NAACP Papers, group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
108. Ella Baker, letter to Mr. Robert H. McLaskey, Apr. 18, 1945,
NAACP Papers, group II, box C66.
109. Campaign Manual for Branches, n.d., EBP; and NAACP Papers,
group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
110. Ella Baker to Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Green, Apr. 14, 1941, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
111. Ella Baker, memo to Walter White, May 3, 1946, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
112. Ella Baker, memo to Walter White, June 4, 1942, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A572, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1940–1945.
113. Ella Baker, letter to Roy Wilkins, Mar. 11, 1942, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A572, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1940–1950.
114. Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, May 14, 1946, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 2.
115. Ibid.
116. Baker, interview by Hogan, 32.
117. Green's biography of Harry Moore, Before His Time, gives more
background on tensions between the national office and militant local
branches.
118. Ella Baker, letter to Roy Wilkins, Mar. 11, 1942, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A572, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1940–1950.
119. Ella Baker, “Conducting Membership Campaigns,” a document
prepared for the 33d Annual NAACP Convention in Los Angeles, 1942,
NAACP Papers (microfilm), 4, reel 11. The document consists of reports
from three field secretaries; the quotation is taken from the section
authored by Ella Baker.
120. Ella Baker, memo to Walter White, May 3, 1946, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C307, General Branch Files.
121. Ella Baker, “Conducting Membership Campaigns,” presented at
33rd annual NAACP conference, Los Angeles, 1942, NAACP Papers
(microfilm), reel 11.
122. Ibid.
123. Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois, 168-69.
124. Ella Baker, letter to Lucille Black, May 4, 1942, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A572, 1940-42.
125. Ella Baker, memo to the Branch Officers, Oct. 2, 1944, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C376, folder: Leadership Training Conference,
National Office, Oct. 1944.
126. Ella Baker, memo to the Branch Officers, Oct. 2, 1944, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C376, folder: Leadership Training Conference,
National Office, Oct. 1944.
127. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 50.
128. Pauli Murray, letter to Walter White, July 23, 1944, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A426, folder: Pauli Murray.
129. Pauli Murray, letter to Roy Wilkins, Aug. 2, 1944, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A426, folder: Pauli Murray.
130. Pauli Murray, letter to Walter White, July 23, 1944, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A426, folder: Pauli Murray.
131. Roy Wilkins, letter to Ella Baker, July 3, 1946, NAACP Papers,
group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker.
132. Ella Baker, memo to the Branch Officers, Oct. 2, 1944, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C376, folder: Leadership Training Conference,
National Office, Oct. 1944.
133. Ibid.
134. Tulsa Leadership Conference, 1946, NAACP Papers, group II,
box C376, folder: Leadership Training Conference, Nov. 1944; and
Report of the Dept. of Branches for Feb. 11, 1946 Board of Directors
Meeting, NAACP Papers, group II, box C390, Monthly reports, 1945-46.
135. Ella Baker, memo to the Branch Officers, Oct. 2, 1944, NAACP
Papers, group II, box C376, folder: Leadership Training Conference,
National Office, Oct. 1944.
136. Ibid.
137. Ibid.
138. Ibid.
139. Baker, interview by Hogan, 45-49.
140. Braden, interview by author, Jan. 3, 1997.
141. Parks, telephone interview by author.
142. Hill, interview by author; Current, telephone interview by
author.
143. Hill, interview by author.
144. Baker, interview by Britton, 5-6.
145. Hill, interview by author.
146. The specific nature of the issue at Sydenham hospital remains
unclear. The tenor of Walter White's memo suggested that he was more
concerned with the recalcitrant behavior of two female staff members
than with the actual substance of the issue itself. He described their
dissension as “embarassing”—presumably to him. Memo from Walter
White to Ella Baker and Ruby Hurley, May 17, 1944, NAACP Papers,
group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1943-44; Baker, interview
by Hogan, 30; Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, May 14, 1946, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 2.
147. Ella Baker, memo to Walter White and Thurgood Marshall, Nov.
5, 1945, NAACP Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker,
1945.
148. Walter White, letter to Ella Baker, Nov. 13, 1945, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1945. Also see Ella
Baker, memo to Walter White in which Ella Baker rebuffs criticisms for
violating procedures, ca. 1945, EBP.
149. Ella Baker, letters to Walter White, Feb. 23, 1943 and Dec. 27,
1943, NAACP Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker,
1943-44. These memos indicate specific health problems and doctor's
visits.
150. Ella Baker, letter to Miss Freeland, Aug. 11, 1945, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1945.
151. Walter White, telegram to Ella Baker, Oct. 18, 1945, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1945. The staff was
small and spent long hours working in close proximity. It would have
seemed appropriate for the executive officer to attend the funeral of a
close family member of one of his staff. In his telegram, White
acknowledged Martha as Ella Baker's sister, indicating that he realized
she was an immediate family member.
152. Letter to Ella Baker, signed “your brother,” Jan. 3, 1946, EBP.
153. Solomon, interview by author.
154. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 56.
155. Brockington, interview by author.
156. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 58.
157. Clarke, interview by author.
158. For biographical information on Bethune, see Ross, “Mary
McLeod Bethune and the National Youth Administration; Hine et al.,
eds., Black Women in America, vol. 1 (Bethune entry by Elaine M.
Smith).
159. Ella Baker, letter to Mary McLeod Bethune, Nov. 18, 1945,
NAACP Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 1945; and
see Bethune, letter to Ella Baker, Nov. 27, 1945, EBP.
160. Ella Baker, letter to Walter White, May 14, 1946, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker, 2 (resignation
letter); also see Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Why Du Bois Was Fired in
1948,” Masses and Mainstream 1, no. 9 (November 1948): 15-26.
161. Current, interview by author.
162. John L. Leflore, letter to Ella Baker, July 12, 1946, NAACP
Papers, group II, box A573, folder: Staff, Ella Baker. Leflore was an
especially good friend of Baker's, since the two of them had worked
together through the YNCL during the 1930s. He was listed as council
chairman of the YNCL in Mobile, Ala., on the Young Negroes
Cooperative League stationery of around 1932. See EBP, YNCL files.
163. William A. Fowlkes, “U.S. Warned To Make Democracy Work
at Home: Miss Ella Baker Electrifies Jan. 1 Bethel Audience,” Atlanta
Daily World, Jan. 2, 1947, 1.
CHAPTER FIVE
The epigraph is from Braden, The Wall Between, 341.
1. On Baker's involvement in the New York City NAACP branch, see
NAACP Papers, group II, series C, B127, branch file, New York, Library
of Congress.
2. Ella Baker to “Dear Sir,” n.d., EBP, cites the 1950 call for the
Emergency Mobilization. Horne, Black and Red; Gloster Current, memo
to Thurgood Marshall, Nov. 7, 1952, NAACP Papers, group II, box
A128, folder: Committee on Political Domination. Current's memo,
which outlines the NAACP's stance on the exclusion of communists,
reads: “The 41st Annual Convention in Boston adopted an anticommunist resolution on June 23, 1950.” That resolution (which was
attached to the memo) empowered the Board of Directors “to take the
necessary action to eradicate such infiltration [by communists] and if
necessary to suspend and reorganize or lift the charter and expel any
unit, which … comes under Communist or other political control or
domination.” Current went on to cite a January 2, 1951, recommendation
from the board of the NAACP that required branch officials to report
“communistic or other political infiltration or domination.” Similar
resolutions were passed in 1956 at the San Francisco annual convention.
3. Baker acknowledged that Communists and socialists of various
stripes had been some of the most militant fighters against racial
discrimination and economic injustice.
4. Baker, interview by Urban Review editors, 10. For information on
Bea Levison, see Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race, and Power, 46,
111, 147.
5. See Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door. In Baker,
interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 59, mention is made of Galamison
and Stein.
6. Ella Baker to Mamie and Kenneth Clark, July 28, 1952, Kenneth
B. Clark Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., box 60, folder
7; Kenneth Clark to “Dear Friend,” ca. 1953, letter on Intergroup
Committee on New York Public Schools letterhead (Ella Baker is listed
on the letterhead as a member of the steering committee), Clark Papers,
box 56, folder 2.
7. Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race and Power, 24, 27, 32-33.
8. Ibid., 18.
9. “Harlem Students Learn Inferiority,” Amsterdam News, May 1,
1954, 1. “Dear Friends” letter from Kenneth Clark, June 14, 1954; press
release regarding “Children Apart” conference, Apr. 23, 1954; Clark
Papers, box 56, folder 2. Ella Baker to Kenneth Clark, July 18, 1953,
Clark Papers, box 93, folder 10.
10. Cantarow and O'Malley, “Ella Baker,” 68.
11. See Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, for a vivid, firstperson account.
12. Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door, 67-69.
13. Ibid., 70.
14. Sara Black, “Don't Forget N.Y. Has Its Own School Problem,”
Amsterdam News, Sept. 28, 1957, 1.
15. Ibid.
16. See Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race and Power; Biondi,
To Stand and Fight.
17. Letter to Ruth Moore from Ella Baker, Feb. 25, 1957, on In
Friendship letterhead, Amzie Moore Papers, box 2, folder:
Correspondence, 2, State Historical Society of Wisconsin (SHSW),
Madison.
18. NAACP Papers, group II, box A456, folder: New York City
police brutality, 1953-54; and “Law Which Police Flaunted,” Amsterdam
News, Feb. 21, 1953, 2.
19. “Resignation Urged of 2 Top Officials,” Amsterdam News, Feb.
21, 1953, 2.
20. “Two Public Protests Set for Sunday,” Amsterdam News, Feb. 28,
1953, 3. See Feb. 19, 1953, press release from NAACP national office,
“Civic groups demand action against secret rights pact,” NAACP Papers,
group II, box A456, folder: New York City police brutality.
21. Telegram to Mayor Vincent R. Impelliteri from Ella Baker, Feb.
16, 1953, NAACP Papers, group II, box A456, New York City police
brutality folder, 1953-54.
22. NAACP Papers, group II, box A456, folder: New York City
police brutality, 1953-54.
23. Telegram to Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri from Ella Baker, Feb.
16, 1953, NAACP Papers, group II, box A456, folder: New York City
police brutality, 1953-54; “Two Public Protests Set for Sunday,”
Amsterdam News, Feb. 28, 1953, 3.
24. “Two Public Protests Set for Sunday.”
25. “A ‘Red’ Plot Says Police Assn.—NAACP Leaders Answer
Charges,” Amsterdam News, Mar. 21, 1953, 2.
26. “Monaghan Starts Anti-Bias Training,” Amsterdam News, Mar.
28, 1953.
27. “Ella Baker Liberal Party Candidate” (flyer), EBP, 1950s files,
Liberal Party or New York Politics folder.
28. By 1951 Baker had known Robinson for at least three years. She
had proposed to work with him in garnering support for the Morningside
Community Center, but these plans did not materialize. Ella Baker to
James Robinson, Jan. 26, 1948, EBP.
29. For information on Baker's city council candidacy, see “Ella
Baker Resigns to Run for Council,” Amsterdam News, Sept. 12, 1953.
30. Pauli Murray to Ella Baker, Nov. 2, 1953, EBP.
31. See also Murray, Autobiography of a Black Activist, and Pauli
Murray Papers, “Liberal Party,” box 73h, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe
College, Cambridge, Mass.
32. Yevette Richards, Maida Springer, 71.
33. Naison, Communists in Harlem, 232-47; and Yevette Richards,
Maida Springer, 71.
34. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) became
a permanent standing committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in
1946, after two previous incarnations. The committee then zealously
took up the task of ferreting out alleged Communists and subversives
ostensibly to protect U.S. national security from pro-Soviet spies and
enemies of the government. The commmittee's hearings, held around the
country, put dissidents of all sorts on trial to prove they were not
Communists. Many were blacklisted; careers were destroyed; and
several people went to jail for refusing on prinicpal to cooperate with
such an undemocratic body.
35. For more on anticommunism and the American left, including
African American progressives and organized labor, see Polsgrove,
Divided Minds, and Dudziak, Cold War, Civil Rights.
36. “Lovestonites,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. Buhle
et al., 436.
37. FBI report, Ella Baker files, New York. There are numerous
unsigned reports throughout Baker's file. My conclusions are drawn from
extracting information from nearly a dozen short, unsigned reports.
38. NAACP Papers, group II, box A128, folder: Committee on
Political Domination, 1952.
39. “Report” of the New York Branch of the NAACP, Internal
Security Committee, Oct. 14, 1957, submitted by Aloncita J. Flood; and
James Robinson to Roy Wilkins, letter with committee report attached,
Nov. 18, 1957, NAACP Papers, group III, box C102, folder: “Internal
Security Committee.”
40. Russell Crawford to Benjamin J. Davis Jr., Nov. 9, 1957, ibid.
41. Grant, Ella Baker, 99.
42. Baker, interview by Walker, 29.
43. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 84.
44. Baker, interview by Hayden and Thrasher, 61.
45. Moss, Moving On, 79-80.
46. Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 43.
47. Branch, Parting the Waters, 168-72. For more information on
Rustin, see Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin, which deals very little with
Rustin's sexuality. A forthcoming biography by John D'Emilio promises
to take up the issue in greater depth. Homosexuality and Communism
were closely related offenses in the twisted minds of McCarthyites,
giving Rustin good reason to be doubly cautious.
48. Branch, Parting the Waters, 168.
49. A. Philip Randolph to “Dear Friends,” Feb. 17, 1956, A. Philip
Randolph Papers, box 23, In Friendship folder, 1956, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
50. A. Philip Randolph, letter to In Friendship, Feb. 17, 1956,
Norman Thomas Papers (microfilm), reel 30, General Correspondence
folder, New York Public Library.
51. Norman Thomas, letter to A. Philip Randolph, Mar. 8, 1956,
Randolph Papers, box 23, In Friendship folder, 1956.
52. J. Oscar Lee, letter to Norman Thomas, Jan. 30, 1956, outlines
other activities under way; Fay Bennett, letter to Norman Thomas, Jan.
19, 1956, Norman Thomas Papers (microfilm), reel 30.
53. Minutes of the Executive Committee of “In Friendship,” June 20,
1956, New York City, A. Philip Randolph Papers, LC, box 23, “In
Friendship” folder, 1956, 2.
54. Baker, interview by Walker, 7.
55. Ella J. Baker, memo to Executive Committee of In Friendship,
July 26, 1956, NAACP Papers, group III, box A177.
56. Ella Baker to Rev. Kilgore, Feb. 26, 1956, EBP.
CHAPTER SIX
1. For an account of the participation of women in the initiation of the
boycott, see Jo Anne Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott
and the Women Who Started It.
2. Baker, interview by Morris, 24A.
3. Brockington, interview by author, includes an assessment of
Baker's views about King.
4. See Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; and Payne, I've
Got the Light of Freedom.
5. Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America, 38.
6. Baker, interview by Walker, 10.
7. Ibid., 9-10.
8. Ibid., 91.
9. Ibid., 19.
10. Ibid., 20.
11. Ibid., 27.
12. Ling, “Gender and Generation.”
13. Baker, interview by Britton, 10.
14. Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 83-86.
15. Ibid., 99.
16. Fairclough and others point out that King was never openly
anticommunist, as some of his NAACP colleagues were, but he was at
times politically pragmatic and at other times am